Contents

Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1: A Monster Visits Suburbia
Chapter 2: The Princess Curse
Chapter 3: Tricks, Not Treats
Chapter 4: A Demon in the Front Yard
Chapter 5: Home and Abroad
Chapter 6: The Transit Corridor
Chapter 7: The Transit Officer
Chapter 8: The Bizarre Bazaar
Chapter 9: The Motivational Motion Device
Chapter 10: The Merchant of Shadows
Chapter 11: The Royal Stables
Chapter 12: Tuntuni’s Tale
Chapter 13: A Costly Mistake
Chapter 14: The Gold and Silver Spheres
Chapter 15: Stepmothers
Chapter 16: The Moving Map
Chapter 17: Flying Fangirls
Chapter 18: The Kingdom of Serpents
Chapter 19: The Python Jewel
Chapter 20: A Change of Plans
Chapter 21: The Serpent King
Chapter 22: A Princess’s Tears
Chapter 23: The Ruby Red Sea
Chapter 24: The Land of Demons
Chapter 25: To Grandmother’s House
Chapter 26: The Maya Mountains
Chapter 27: A Well of Darkness
Chapter 28: The Thirsty Crow
Chapter 29: The Baby Demon
Chapter 30: The Demon’s Mouth
Chapter 31: The Man Behind the Baby
Chapter 32: But How?
Chapter 33: Home Again, Home Again
Author’s Note
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Preview of Book #2
Copyright
To immigrant parents and children everywhere—
who imagine an idea called home into being
through the telling of stories.
And to my own immigrant parents—
who told me stories, believed in my stories,
and keep helping me imagine my way home.
The day my parents got swallowed by a rakkhosh and
whisked away to another galactic dimension was a pretty
craptastic day. The fact that it was actually my twelfth birthday
made it all that much worse. Instead of cake or presents or a
party, I spent the day kicking demon butt, traveling through
time and space looking for my family, and basically saving
New Jersey, our entire world, and everything beyond it. Not
that I didn’t have help. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll
tell you that part soon. First, let me back up a little.
My life pre-rakkhosh incident had been pretty ordinary—I
spent most of my time at school, hanging out with my best
friend, Zuzu, at her family’s diner, and helping at my parents’
store. There were Zuzu’s grandma’s spanakopita and Baba’s
stockroom inventories, doing homework and avoiding my
next-door-neighbor-slash-archnemesis, Jovi, and her giggly
gang of popular girls. Regular old sixth-grade stuff. Nothing
that really prepared me for interdimensional demon slaying.
I guess Ma and Baba had tried to warn me, in their own
goofy way. Ever since I was a little girl, they’d told me
awesome stories about rakkhosh: these carnivorous, snot-
trailing demons who liked to speak in rhyme while chomping
on innocent villagers. Ever heard of Jack’s giant, the one who
wants to grind Englishmen’s bones to make his bread? Well,
add some horns, fangs, and talons to Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, and
you’re getting close to picturing a rakkhosh. But no matter
how real giants or demons or goblins seem in stories, nothing
can prepare you for seeing one on your doorstep, right?
 But that’s exactly what happened to me on my twelfth
birthday. Which, because fate clearly has a twisted sense of
humor, also happens to be Halloween.
I’d always hated having a Halloween birthday. When I was
younger, it was because everyone was so busy gearing up for
trick-or-treating, they usually forgot it was my special day.
Worse still, my parents never let me hide behind a superhero
or monster mask. No matter how much I tried to be like every
other witch or zombie or caped crusader in the neighborhood,
my parents always had other ideas.
“Maybe this year I could be a pirate,” I’d suggest, holding
out some scarves and gold hoop earrings.
“Or a ghost?” I’d beg from under an old bedsheet.
But every year, my parents insisted on the same costume. A
costume that made me stand out more, not less.
“Darling piece of the moon, you must be an Indian
princess!” they would enthuse. “You are, after all, a real Indian
princess, and here is the single day that you can actually look
like one!”
When I was in the first or second grade, the other kids
thought the shiny silk saris my mom wrapped me in on
Halloween were cool. They believed me when I told them the
bangles and necklaces I wore were made of real emeralds,
diamonds, and rubies. But there are only so many years you
can fool your friends—or yourself—into thinking you are a
real Indian princess, banished from your fairy tale and hiding
out in a suburban split-level in northern New Jersey. No matter
what your crazy parents insist. Pretty soon, the rest of the
world starts catching on.
“Doesn’t your dad own the Quickie Mart on Route 46?”
Jovi asked one day when we were about nine. “What kind of a
king owns a Quickie Mart?”
She’d been snapping her gum and tossing her perfect blond
hair and giving me this look like I was less than dirt. I had
wanted to disappear into the floor right then and there.
When my mother heard, she gave me some typically loopy
advice. “My royal daughter,” Ma had singsonged, “none of us
is just one thing. Life is a process of learning to recognize our
many faces.”
“Besides which, your friends are right; no king worth his
throne would own a Quickie Mart!” Baba had boomed from
behind our store’s Giant Gulpie fountain. “Go tell your
classmates that even kings and queens have to work hard when
they move to a new country. And remind them, your father
does not own a Quickie Mart; he owns a Royal Farms
Convenience Emporium!”
“And if they still don’t believe you,” Ma added from the
aisle where she was restocking the meat-flavored jerky, “tell
them we’re not your real parents. Tell them you’re the
daughter of an underworld serpent king and we found you
when you were a baby floating in a clay pot down the River of
Dreams.”
I guess every kid whose family is from somewhere else
thinks their parents are weird. But with mine, it wasn’t just
their language or their clothes or their food. It was something
more—like my parents never really appreciated the
distinctions between fact and fiction, science and mythology,
dreams and reality. But it wasn’t until that fateful twelfth
birthday that I really understood why.
The day began just like any other October morning in
Parsippany, New Jersey. No ominous portents of doom, no
noticeable rifts in the time-space continuum, not even a
multicar, tractor-trailer pileup on the Jersey Turnpike. Just an
autumn sky ribboned with tangerine clouds that tumbled in
and over one another, like a bunch of orange-flavored cotton
candy. But if you were looking carefully (which I wasn’t) and
had watched enough sci-fi television to know (which I
probably had), you might have seen a tornado-shaped shadow
hidden in all those clouds, something that looked like an
intergalactic wormhole.
But like any Dorothy at the beginning of her adventure, I
was pretty clueless back then. I had no idea that soon I
wouldn’t be in Kansas anymore (okay, New Jersey, but you get
where I’m going with the metaphor).
The morning of my twelfth birthday, I totally slept through
my alarm. It was Zuzu’s phone call that woke me up.
“Feliz cumpleaños! Joyeux anniversaire! Most felicitous of
birthdays, Princess Kiran!” The voice shouting over the house
phone was way too chipper for that early in the morning. Not
to mention the extra chipperness of her shouting in multiple
languages.
I made a little gagging sound. Zuzu knew perfectly well
that I was allergic to anything remotely princess-y. It was
probably because of my parents’ obsession, but I couldn’t
stand princesses of any culture. Whether in saris and bangles
or tutus and tiaras, the thing that really got to me about
princesses was all that self-righteous, Pepto-Bismol-pink-
coated prettiness. And of course all that waiting: waiting for
princes to come, waiting for fate to change, waiting for rescue
to swoop in. Just thinking about it made my throat feel like it
was closing up.
“It’s my birthday, and you’re going to make me choke on
my own bile.” I squinted my eyes against the morning sun,
wishing for the quadrillionth time that my mother would let
me have curtains on my windows. But she’d somehow gotten
it into her head that it was healthier for young people to sleep
in the moonlight.
“Oh, I think you’ll survive that, Princess Pretty Pants.” I
imagined Zuzu pushing her hipster-red glasses up her pert
nose. “But Ms. Valdez might impale you with her protractor if
you miss the math test today.”
Gah. I finally registered the time. “Oh, man, I’m totally
late!”
“Ahde! Schnell! You better hurry, babe!” Zuzu chirped.
“But don’t you fret, this is going to be the wildest birthday
ever!”
I had no idea then just how right she would be.
Forget a special birthday outfit; I threw on my favorite pair
of jeans and a black T-shirt, and quickly braided my dark hair
so that it covered the weird scar I had on the back of my neck
—one of the two that my parents swore were nothing more
than big birthmarks. I tied a bandanna over the even uglier
scar, the one on my upper arm that looks like a pair of saggy
glasses, and then, for double protection, threw on my favorite
black hoodie. I ran down the stairs, ignoring the odd
expressions on my parents’ faces, their strained birthday
greetings, even the elaborate breakfast of puffed luchi bread
and potatoes Ma had made for me.
 “Kiranmala—” Baba began, but I cut him off.
“You know …” I snuck a few chocolate cookies from the
pantry into my pocket. “I was thinking, tonight, for trick-or-
treating, I might go as a vampire.”
“There is not enough fiber in that, darling.” Baba’s sharp
eyes hadn’t missed my contraband breakfast. “Roughage is
very necessary for good digestion.”
Ignoring Baba’s worries about my digestive system, I
shoved a cookie in my mouth, then slipped on my favorite
shoes—bright purple combat boots Zuzu and I had found at
the thrift store. I threw my backpack on my shoulder and
hoped Ma wouldn’t yell at me too much about not eating the
food she’d made.
“You don’t have to buy me a vampire outfit, maybe just
some fake plastic teeth?”
My mouth was all thick with chocolate, and I wished I had
time to pour myself something to drink.
“What is this vampire-shmampire?”
Ma handed me a glass of lactose-free milk as she asked
this. I was expecting the milk to be accompanied by a “you
better eat a proper breakfast” death-glare, but Ma seemed too
tired to scold. There were circles under her caramel-colored
eyes, and the normally tidy bouffant on her head was a bit
lopsided.
“Oh, you know what a vampire is.” I bared my teeth, doing
a bad impression of an old movie monster. “I vant to suck your
blood.”
Baba shook his finger in mock jocularity. “A vampire is a
second-rate monster, if you ask me. Now, a rakkhosh—that’s a
monster with some chutzpah!” My father loved using
expressions he learned from his customers. “Suck your blood?
A rakkhosh will suck the very marrow from your bones and
then use your finger as a toothpick!”
His laugh, which jiggled his paunchy belly as usual,
seemed a little forced. While this all struck me as weird at the
time, I just chalked it up to my parents’ baseline weirdness.
“My piece of the moon, my garland of moonbeams,” Ma
began as she took my empty glass. “There is something …”
She was going to start in on the whole Indian princess
routine, I knew it.
“Don’t worry about the vampire thing, Ma, it was just an
idea.” I turned the front door handle, ready to jet. “I’m going
to be late for school.”
“Kiranmala, wait,” a voice called, but I didn’t respond.
I stood on our porch, looking out over our totally bare front
yard. The contrast between our rickety fixer-upper and all our
neighbors’ McMansions hit me. Everyone else on the street
had manicured lawns with pruned hedges and flower beds.
Us? Barely skeletal hedges and raggedy trees. I blushed,
remembering how Jovi had once asked if lawn maintenance
was against our religion.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the school bus turn onto
the street.
“Princess …” Baba called.
“In the name of the Garden State Parkway, how many times
do I have to tell you guys?” I jogged down the front steps.
“For the last time already, I am not a princess!”
Ma looked stricken and I wondered if the words had come
out harsher than I intended.
The regret nipped at me, but I didn’t have time to make
nice like a good daughter now. “Look, I have to go, okay?”
 That was when I heard the bus door open behind me with a
whoosh. I sensed more than saw the kids on the bus taking in
my family scene—Baba in his ratty, too tight kurta; Ma in a
blinding, bright yellow-and-green sari, her bare, ringed toes
peeping out from beneath the frayed hem. I felt the heat of
mixed emotions flood my cheeks. Why couldn’t they just be
like everybody else?
I rushed to get on the bus. But in my hurry, I tripped in the
snake ditch—the long, shallow trench that Baba kept dug
around our yard to protect us from Parsippany’s nonexistent
cobra population.
I could hear kids on the bus snickering and kept my head
down as I took my seat. I only looked up as the school bus
pulled away to see both my parents standing in the driveway. I
couldn’t hear them, and through the thick pane of glass, their
faces looked strange and distorted.
All day long, the guilt churned in my stomach. I couldn’t
shake the memory of my parents’ anxious expressions. What
had they wanted to tell me? Well, maybe this would convince
them to let me have a cell phone, like every other twelve-year-
old kid in the universe. I planned my argument all day at
school with Zuzu, who was obsessed with languages and loved
using long, complicated words to get her way.
“Mobile telecommunications are a critical component of
modern society,” I rattled off as I opened the front door that
afternoon. But I stopped mid-argument. The house was
strangely still.
Ma and Baba never both worked on my birthday. At least
one of them was usually waiting inside the door to ambush me
with food and presents. Where were they?
I took off my boots and crossed into the kitchen, noticing
the back door was propped open at an odd angle. I knew that
the hinges were old, but this was ridiculous. One more item to
add to the list of things that needed fixing. I shut it the best I
could behind me, and stepped back into the house.
That’s when I noticed that Ma’s normally spotless kitchen
was a mess. The kitchen chairs were this way and that, with
one upside down near the door, like someone had knocked it
over as they ran.
My heart started beating so loud, my head felt like a drum.
I’d seen way too many television crime dramas not to think
that maybe someone had broken in.
 “Hello?” I called, my voice cracking. I eased a knife out of
the countertop butcher block.
But as I took a quick turn around our small house, there
was nothing else out of place. Even Ma’s small jewelry box
was where it should be on her bedside dresser. I returned to the
front hall, confused.
Where were my parents? How had they forgotten about my
special day?
What I saw by the front door made me feel a little better.
On a rickety folding table rested a covered tray of homemade
rasagollas and sandesh with a note that read:
For the dear trick-or-treaters
(gluten-free, nut-free, and made with lactose-free milk
obtained humanely from free-range cows)
Classic! I laughed shakily, putting down the knife. I was
letting my imagination get the best of me. Nothing could be
wrong if my mother had remembered to make homemade
Indian sweets for the neighborhood kids. It was one of her
Halloween traditions. The problem was, cloth grocery bags
and old pillowcases aren’t made to carry around the syrupy,
round rasagollas or molasses-sweetened cakes of sandesh she
handed out to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters. But it would
never have occurred to my parents to just give out store-
bought candy. Another example of their overall cluelessness.
I was about to grab a sticky rasagolla myself when I spotted
something else lying on the floor. A birthday card, half in and
half out of an envelope. It was Baba’s typical sense of humor
—a bright neon pink and sparkly card meant for a baby. On
the front was, what else, a crown-wearing princess under the
words Daughter, you’re 2! Only, Baba had taken a Sharpie and
written a number 1 before the 2 so that it read 12. Har-dee-har.
Again, typical Baba. But why was it on the floor like this?
Wiping my syrupy fingers on my jeans, I picked it up.
Inside the card, under the words Have a Spark-a-licious
birthday!, was a scrawled message, so unlike Ma’s normally
precise handwriting.
Take heart, dear daughter.
We were hoping for the last dozen years that it would
not come to pass. But it has happened—the magical
spell protecting us all has been broken on this, your
twelfth birthday. Forgive us for trying to shield you
from the truth. Now there is too little time to explain.
Whatever you do, do not let any rakkhosh into the
house. Trust the princes to keep you safe, but more
importantly, trust yourself. We leave here some extra
rupees and a moving map in case you find them of use.
But I beg you, do not try to find us. It is far too
dangerous. We go now to that dark and terrible origin
place where all spells meet their end.
(Oh, and make sure to take your gummy vitamins
every morning.)
Darling piece of the moon, the first thing you must do
is to find—
The note broke off there with a big, ugly inkblot, as if she’d
been startled by something into stopping mid-sentence.
I shook the envelope, and out fell a small wad of colorful,
unfamiliar bills—the rupees Ma had mentioned. But the other
thing in the envelope wasn’t a map at all—just a yellowed
piece of blank paper.
 That was it. They had always been odd, but now my
parents had totally gone off the deep end. I called their cell
phones and the phone at the store. When I got only voicemail,
I started to really panic. If this was some kind of a bizarre
Halloween trick, it wasn’t funny. All that stuff about princes
and rakkhosh—what planet did Ma and Baba think we were
living on?
I felt myself start to tear up, and bit the inside of my cheek
to stop the waterworks from spilling out. Along with dressing
and acting in ways that were unnoticeable, it was another of
my self-imposed rules for making it through middle school.
There was no crying. Not ever. Tears were like a door to a
scary room inside myself I’d most definitely rather keep
closed.
I took a big breath and tried to calm down. Weeping is for
wimps.
I was about to call Zuzu at her parents’ restaurant when the
doorbell began to ring nonstop. It was the little kids—dressed
as fairies and animals and superheroes—out with their parents
before it got dark. In a daze, my head still swirling, I handed
out the messy sweets.
“Gee, thanks!” said a little boy dressed as Robin Hood.
“This is a lot better than the dentist lady next door. She’s
giving out toothbrushes!”
I shut the door with shaking hands, my heart tight in my
chest. Dusk was settling onto the neighborhood. Where were
my parents? What had happened to them? Why had they told
me not to try and find them?
Just then, the doorbell rang again.
Standing on the front porch were the strangest trick-or-
treaters I’d ever seen: two boys, about my age, maybe a little
older. They looked like brothers. The smiling one was so
handsome he almost melted my eyeballs. The other one was
taller and broader, and looked a little bored. The funny thing
was the way they were both dressed—in flowing shirts and
pants in the same sparkling fabrics as Ma’s saris. They were
wearing silk turbans and shoes with curling-up toes. Each had
what looked like a jewel-encrusted sword tucked into the sash
around his waist. The handsome boy’s sash and turban were
red, and the taller boy’s were blue.
“Blast you, little brother; she’s probably been eaten
already,” the boy in blue was saying as I opened the door.
“You just had to stop for that Giant Gulpie, didn’t you?”
“That Giant Gulpie is the only reason we made it here at
all,” argued his brother. “You never want to ask for directions,
you stubborn rhinoceros.”
But I didn’t have time to make sense of all that, because at
that moment, the boy in red looked straight at me with his
movie-star eyes.
 Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those boy-crazy
goobers whose rooms are wallpapered with posters of floppy-
haired boy bands. And I don’t fill my school notebooks with
my initials and the initials of some cute boy surrounded by a
goofy heart. It’s not that Zuzu and I don’t have a few
celebrities whose pictures we like to look up on websites like
Cute Boys Do Dental Hygiene Too. (I mean, who doesn’t like
to see their favorite TV star flossing his teeth for the cameras?)
But until that moment when I opened the front door, I’d never
met someone so handsome in real life.
“Are you ready, my lady?” the boy must’ve been asking,
but something had gone all wonky with my hearing, so he just
sounded like one of the teachers in a Peanuts cartoon—“Waa
waa waa waa waa.” Boy, was he good-looking. I felt a shiver,
the kind I might describe in a note to Zuzu with little asterisks
around it. *shiver*
The boy looked at my dark jeans and black sweatshirt,
furrowing his brows. Not that it made him any less pretty.
“Brother Neel, I don’t believe the lady is ready.”
Then the other guy—whose name was Neel?—reached out
for the tray of sweets in my hand. He popped at least two
rasagollas in his mouth, not even worrying about the sticky
sauce dripping down his chin. Gross.
“You’re supposed to say ‘trick or treat,’” I said primly, then
immediately wanted to kick myself. Two cute boys come to
my door and the first thing out of my mouth is, “You’re
supposed to say ‘trick or treat’”? How uncool was I?
“It must be like a costume, Lal.” Neel winked while licking
syrup off his fingers. “No one wears boring clothes like that
for real.”
An uncomfortable heat rushed over my face. “What are
you, the fashion police?”
 Even though I amazed myself by coming up with a smart
answer in time, the tall boy’s statement stung. Here was
another rich kid with fancy clothes, I thought, making me feel
bad about what I could afford to wear. And what about them—
Lal and Neel? Weren’t those the Bengali words for red and
blue? And they were dressed according to their names? How
fashion forward was that?
When Neel reached out to pick up more sweets, I slapped
his hand away. Hard.
“Yo, easy, Prin-cess!” The way he said it, all sarcastic and
dragged out, made me think he was making fun of me.
Obviously, I was the furthest thing from a princess in his mind.
I felt a pricking behind my eyes and I blinked the moisture
away like crazy. Then, as if the atmosphere was reflecting my
mood, the air became filled with a putrid, garbage-y smell.
What was that?
I turned my back on Neel and his mocking eyes, and
appealed to the handsome Lal. “Am I ready? Am I ready for
what?” I put my hand on the door.
But the boy in red didn’t answer. Instead, he took out his
sword—which suddenly didn’t look like a costume sword at
all. It looked shiny. And sharp. Before I could react, he
grabbed my wrist and tried to yank me out of the house toward
him.
Now, if I wasn’t as streetwise as I am (I’ve been to
Manhattan five times and ridden the subway twice), I might
have made the mistake of thinking this was some kind of
dream come true. But I’m a Jersey girl, and Jersey girls are no
dummies. I knew perfectly well that no matter how handsome
someone is, you can’t let them start grabbing at you. Seriously,
I’ve seen a lot of made-for-TV movies in my time, and those
serial killers are always super good-looking.
 “Get off me!” I said in my loudest anti-attacker voice.
Every muscle and nerve in my body felt taut—ready to fight. I
shook him off, and pulled myself back into the house. I
weighed the serving tray in my hand, ready to clobber him in
his gorgeous head if I needed to.
“That, my dear lady,” Lal finally said. “Are you ready for
that?” He pointed at something behind me.
It was then that I realized that Lal wasn’t the one I had to
worry about.
Someone in a snarling monster costume had slammed
through the half-open kitchen door. The creature was at least
ten feet tall, with warty green-black skin, enormous horns and
fangs, and beady eyes that squinted as if it couldn’t see very
well in the light. It drooled a stream of thick saliva on Ma’s
clean floor. The costume was freakishly good. Too good. My
hand went loose and a bunch of sweets slid to the floor. Neel
grabbed the falling tray before it crashed down.
My heart hammered so loudly in my ears, Lal’s next words
came from miles away.
“It’s a rakkhosh, my lady! Come for tricks, I fear, not
treats!”
A rakkhosh. A rakkhosh? Not somebody in a costume, but
a real demon—straight out of one of Baba’s folktales? Right
here, in my kitchen, in Parsippany, New Jersey?
I tried to scream, but the room had gone all wickety-
wockety, like one of those paintings of melting clocks. My
bones were molasses.
The monster crashed blindly around the kitchen, ripping off
the refrigerator door with its razor-sharp nails, crushing the
cabinets with its huge feet. It was kind of hunched over, but its
horns gouged long holes in the ceiling, and plaster flaked
down on its already beady eyes.
“My parents told me not to let a rakkhosh in the house,” I
heard myself squeak.
The demon was tossing back dinner plates like they were
pieces of popcorn. It then started chomping on the still-
plugged-in toaster, making sparks fly everywhere.
“Hate to break it to you, but it’s too late now!” Neel took
out his sword too, but he looked less worried than his brother.
He filled his pockets with the sweets that I’d dropped on the
floor.
I barely had time to grab my birthday card, with the money
and map, before the brothers shoved me out of the house. The
last thing I saw before they slammed the front door behind
them was the demon emptying my fruit-flavored gummy
vitamins into its ginormous mouth.
Finally, I shrieked.
“Oh, man, my mom is going to kill me!”
Things got seriously weirder after that. I ran out of the house,
my feet barely shoved into my untied boots. The first thing I
saw were two winged horses standing in a corner of the front
lawn, snuffling at the few lone strands of grass Baba hadn’t
killed. There was a medium-sized white one with snow-
colored wings and a larger, dangerous-looking black one with
feathers the color of a raven. Their wings were muscular and
wide, sprouting right out where you’d imagine their shoulders
would be. Both horses pawed the ground near Baba’s snake
ditch. They whinnied nervously. Apparently, they didn’t like
snakes either.
Some little trick-or-treaters on the sidewalk gaped at the
winged horses, giggling and pointing, but their parents ignored
the animals—as if the horses had some kind of grown-ups-
can’t-see-me spell on them. Even as the adults sauntered by
with their little ghosties, firefighters, and goblins in hand, a
group of high schoolers dressed as punk-zombie-rockers
stopped in front of the house to squint at the winged horses,
blinking as if they weren’t really sure what they were looking
at.
“Wicked horse costume, man!” a boy with mascara and a
nose ring shouted as we came rushing out of the house. “Hey,
who’s in there?” he yelled into the white horse’s nose.
“Unhand our horses, sir!” Lal yelled as Nose Ring tried to
pull one of the midnight feathers off the stallion’s wings.
The pack of costumed boys broke out laughing. “Check out
the loser! Look at that getup! Fresh off the boat!”
 Lal stopped in front of the boys, growing as red as his
turban. “You uncouth hyenas!”
“Enough already with the posh accent!” I thought I heard
Neel mutter. In a louder voice, he called, “Let it go, Lal!” Neel
and I hadn’t stopped running, and now he shoved me onto the
back of the black horse, which snorted and shifted under me.
“We’ve got more important things to worry about right now!”
The crashing sounds coming from the house were getting
louder. For a second, I thought about how upset Ma would be
at the mess when she came home. But then I remembered I
had no idea where she and Baba were. Had the rakkhosh taken
them before I got there? What was it that Ma wrote?
Something about a protective spell being broken on my
birthday? Was all this really happening? My stomach
clenched, and I felt my tear ducts doing something suspicious,
until I reminded myself: Blubbering is for babies.
Lal put away his sword and rolled up his sleeves. He
circled Nose Ring with his fists raised, like an old-fashioned
boxer. “We are the princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal—guests
in your land from the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and
Thirteen Rivers. You have insulted us, and I must ask for
satisfaction.”
Princes? Ma’s note said something about trusting princes.
The truth was, I guess I’d already decided to trust the boys—
right after I’d figured out they probably weren’t serial killers.
Why else would I be sitting on the back of a winged horse,
waiting for Lal to finish his duel with a teenage zombie?
The horse under me whinnied and stamped its feet, and I
was grateful that Neel had its reigns firmly in hand. But Lal
wasn’t paying either of us any attention.
“You are unarmed, so I challenge you to fisticuffs! Hand-
to-hand combat!”
 Lal’s dark eyes glinted at his opponent, as if he had nothing
better to do than fight a mascara-wearing high schooler. As
handsome as he was, I had to admit, Lal wasn’t the most
practical person I’d ever met. And why did he talk like an old-
fashioned hero when his brother didn’t? It was like he was
playing some movie version of a prince. I almost expected a
little glint of light to cheesily spark off his front tooth. Like:
*ching*
“Hello? Could we move it along? Being chased by a demon
here?” I muttered. Neel gave me a sideways glance.
“Haoo, maoo, khaoo!” The crashing sounds were louder
now, and I could hear the demon’s cries very close to the front
door of the house. The horses skittered and neighed, and I held
on as tightly as I could, but kept my attention on Lal and his
opponents.
“Man, that’s a wicked scary haunted-house tape!” Some of
the high school boys looked nervous and started backing off.
Only Nose Ring stayed. He hacked and spit at Lal’s feet.
The goober hung on a lone blade of grass, shimmering like a
disgusting jewel.
“I demand satisfaction!” Lal yelled. He circled the boy, his
fists still up. Despite how ridiculous he was being, anger only
made Lal more hair-meltingly handsome. While I got my fill
of Lal-flavored eye candy, Neel swung himself up on the ever
more agitated black horse.
“Hold tight,” he ordered over his shoulder. “I bet you don’t
know how to ride and I don’t want you rolling off and getting
pancaked.”
My skin prickled at Prince Neel being so close. Not just
because he was a boy, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever sat that close
to a boy, but because he was an obnoxious boy. A boy who
thought he was all that and a packet of samosas.
“Why can’t I ride with Lal? I bet he’s more of a
gentleman!”
“Oh, sure, he’s more of a gentleman, and better at being
royal too.” Neel raised a dark eyebrow. “But you better believe
I’m the better rider.”
Uck! Obnoxious and an egomaniac! I was about to zing off
a good response, when I heard a cracking noise—like an
iceberg breaking off a glacier.
I looked up just in time to see the entire wall around my
front door collapse. The horse flapped its wings and bucked in
fear. I had no choice but to hang on to Neel’s waist for dear
life.
“Time to go, little bro!” Neel hollered, barely keeping the
animal on the ground.
The rakkhosh pushed through the wall of my house as if it
were tissue paper and held one of the pillars from the front
porch in its hand. Bricks and mortar fell on the demon’s
shoulders, but it brushed them away like raindrops. When its
beady eyes finally focused on the far end of the lawn, the
demon lumbered in our direction, the pillar raised like a club
over its head. Each step made the ground shake.
“Mommy!” Nose Ring was halfway down the street,
running at full speed behind his already disappeared crew.
To my left, I heard a thin, high-pitched voice. Oh no!
“Look at the scary monster costume, Daddy!” A little
mermaid approached the house with her suit-wearing father.
“Run!” I shouted at the dad, since I was pretty sure he
couldn’t see the rakkhosh.
 The father stood frozen, as if he wanted to run but wasn’t
sure why. I shouted at him again, and by some instinct, he
grabbed his daughter and started sprinting down the sidewalk.
The girl’s smiling face bobbed over her father’s back, her tiara
hanging crookedly from her head. “But I want to see the
monster eat the prince, Daddy!”
Lal was paying no attention to the rakkhosh that was
gaining on him by the second. Instead, he shook his fist at
Nose Ring’s departing form.
“Run, you lily-livered lamprey! Run from my wrath!”
Even with a looming demon, a near-eaten neighbor girl, a
spooked horse, and a rude riding companion on my mind, I
noticed that some of Lal’s dark curly locks had come loose
from his turban. *sigh*
The advancing rakkhosh was drooling so much goo from
its mouth now that strings of the frothy stuff were sticking to
the tree stumps and bare bushes it passed. It eyed Lal, licking
its lips.
 “Dirty socks and stinky feet!” the demon screeched. “I
smell royal human meat!” Bristle-like hairs stood up on its
arms and nose.
Wow, rakkhosh really do rhyme! I thought in passing,
before my mind became more appropriately preoccupied with
my imminent death and dismemberment.
Handsome or not, this royal wack job was going to get us
all killed. Trust the princes, Ma had said, but we’d all have to
survive first.
“Come on, Lal!” I yelled. “Let’s get out of here!”
The white horse was just as scared as the black one. Its
eyes were big and its breath came out in audible whooshes
through its nose. But it wasn’t going anywhere without Lal.
The loyal animal opened its wings and took a few steps toward
its master. It shook its mane, as if asking him to get on its
back. The black horse bearing Neel and me shuddered,
dashing this way and that, barely under Neel’s control.
The demon’s black tongue lolled from between his fangs.
“How he’ll holler, how he’ll groan, when I eat the mortal
prince’s bones!”
“Seriously?” Neel mused. “That’s the best meter he could
come up with?”
The horses whinnied in fear and warning.
“Lal!” I screamed. The rakkhosh’s fingernails were inches
from his head.
But just then, Prince Lal did something fairly high on the
Richter scale of stupidity. He launched himself off a tree trunk,
did an Olympic-level double back somersault in the air, and
landed on the demon’s head, gripping its two horns like
motorcycle handle bars.
“Me thinks, sirrah, you need to go on a diet!” Lal
announced. He tried to stab the monster with his sword, but
the rakkhosh’s thick skin stopped the blade from going in too
far.
“This prince is like a little fly!” cried the demon, swatting
at Lal. “Me thinks it’s time for him to die!”
“Aren’t you going to go help him?” I yelled at Neel. He
just sat there in front of me, watching the spectacle.
“Aw shucks, he’s just showing off.” Neel reached into his
pocket and scarfed down a couple more of Ma’s rasagollas.
I shrieked as the monster’s fist managed to connect with
Lal’s head. The prince slumped forward, unconscious, and
then began to slip off the rakkhosh’s neck. Only his red sash,
which had gotten tangled up in one of the demon’s horns,
saved him from crashing down to the ground. Prince Lalkamal
hung upside down from the thrashing monster, his perfect face
deathly still.
And then I don’t know what the heck got into me.
“Well, if you’re not going to help your brother, I will!”
Pushing off Neel’s back, I slid from the dark horse and ran at
the rakkhosh. Unfortunately, I only reached the monster’s
waist. I grabbed Lal’s sword, which had fallen from his limp
hands, and stabbed the hairy demon in the foot.
“Let him go, halitosis-head!”
Some instinct told me to plunge the sword into the soft
spots between the demon’s toes. I was scared, but felt
something else besides fear coursing through my veins.
Something brave and strong and heady. Like I’d been fighting
rakkhosh all my life instead of doing inventory on two-liter
soda bottles and pine tree–shaped car deodorizers.
“Princess smells like yummy pickles!” the demon snarled.
“Stop it! Stop it! Ooo, that tickles!”
I felt the monster grab my hood. “You best not rip my
favorite sweatshirt, you drooling toad!” Sure enough, as the
monster lifted me up, I heard the material start to tear.
I hung from the monster’s fingers ten feet above the
ground. I kicked my legs, swinging my sword in a wild arc.
Lal, still hanging unconscious, was suddenly very close.
“Here, horsey! Come catch your master!” I sliced through
Lal’s tangled sash, freeing him. The unconscious prince
plummeted toward the earth.
Luckily, the monster was too occupied with me to worry
about Lal, and too shortsighted to see the winged horse that
swooped up, catching him on its snow-white back.
 “Good job, Snowy!” I could have sworn the horse smiled at
me as it flew back toward where Neel and the black horse still
stood at the far end of the lawn.
As the rakkhosh lifted me face-high, it was hard not to faint
at the smell coming from its mouth. Holding my breath, I took
aim at its teeny, bloodshot eye and stabbed the sword forward
with all my might. Unfortunately, sword fighting wasn’t on the
curriculum at Alexander Hamilton Middle School, and my aim
wasn’t exactly perfect. I looked in horror as Lal’s weapon
lodged itself right in the middle of the monster’s bulbous nose,
resulting in yellow streams of rakkhosh snot streaming out of
both nostrils.
“Barf!” I yelled as the monster’s sinuses drained all over
me. “Neel, anytime now, some help would be awesome!”
If it was possible, the monster looked even more furious.
“Princess mean, but she’ll be sweet! Princess meat is good to
eat!”
I was done for—abandoned by my parents, covered in
rakkhosh snot, and about to be eaten. This was the worst
birthday ever!
The rakkhosh lowered me toward its toothy mouth.
Just then, something glinted by me with a swish. It grazed
my arm and cheek before getting stuck upright between the
demon’s lips. My right sleeve was sliced open. The side of my
face felt on fire, and not because I was blushing. I realized
what it was. Neel’s sword.
“Gaak!” The monster thrashed around, grabbing its mouth.
In its confusion, it dropped me, and I fell toward the hard
ground. If only my dad hadn’t savaged all signs of life from
our lawn, I thought as I plummeted to my doom, maybe there
would be something there to cushion my landing.
“Yagh!” I yelled, or something like it. “Yeek! Yegads!”
Somebody’s strong arm grabbed me around my waist. It
was Neel, flying up on the back of his black steed. He threw
me in front of him, swinging me over the horse like a sack of
potatoes.
Now, if you’ve never flown on the back of a winged horse
like that, I don’t recommend it. It’s not just the ungraceful
butt-in-air aspect, it’s the mouthful of sweaty horsehair you get
in the bargain. Technically, I guess Prince Neel swept me off
my feet. Actually, it was the exact opposite of the gallant
rescuing you read about in fairy tales.
There was an awful wailing and crashing, which I learned
later (I was still doing a face-plant in the side of a horse at the
time) was the rakkhosh—with one sword protruding from its
nose, one trapped in its open mouth—flailing around. Finally,
it tripped over a tree trunk and fell with a shaking crash to the
ground.
“Somebody’s gonna have a terrible migraine!” Neel
drawled as he dismounted.
I managed to slide ungracefully off the horse, holding my
aching ribs. It was a relief to see the demon lying across my
lawn, out cold.
“I was doing fine there without you, Mr. Late-to-the-
Show!” I snapped at Neel. “You didn’t need to swoop in at the
last moment and do the whole princely rescue shtick.”
Neel gave me a hard look that made my face warm. Then
he looked at my torn sweatshirt and my now exposed right
upper arm. He raised his eyebrows, but only said, “You’re
welcome.”
Humiliation washed over me. I hated people seeing my
scars. I tugged the torn material over the freakish mark and
glared back at him, imagining little daggers coming out of my
eyes.
With a most casual air, Neel walked up to the rakkhosh,
plucked his own slobbery sword from the monster’s mouth,
and then retrieved Lal’s sword from its nose. He handed the
weapon to his brother, who was just waking up.
“Werewevictoriousbrother?” Lal slurred.
“Yup.” Neel got super busy cleaning off his slimy sword on
a leafless hedge. “You completely kicked that demon’s butt,
Bro.” Then he glanced up at me. “With a little help from this
one.”
“Whatever.” I mopped up the blood on my cheek with my
sleeve. I didn’t like being called “this one” almost as much as I
didn’t like getting nearly decapitated with a sword. Even by
somebody who saved my life.
 Neel put his sword into a sheath I hadn’t noticed on his
back, and petted his horse’s sleek nose. It was like he’d totally
forgotten about the rakkhosh. And why was he lying to Lal
and not taking credit for defeating the demon?
“Aren’t you going to … uh … kill it?” I asked in a low
voice. Whether adults could see it or not, how I was going to
explain an unconscious demon on our front lawn was beyond
me.
Neel shook his head. “Yeah, I’m not really into the whole
rakkhosh-killing business; that’s all a little too show-offy for
me.” He nodded at his brother. “There’s only room for one
storybook hero in this family.”
I saw something twitch in Neel’s face—what was that,
jealousy? But that couldn’t be right. Neel was bigger and
tougher than Lal and definitely—by most people’s standards
anyway—cooler. Maybe it was that Lal was more movie-star
handsome? But that didn’t seem right either. Boys were weird.
“Come on, let’s go!” Neel urged. “That demon ain’t going
to sleep forever.”
I bit my lip, suddenly super unsure.
“Lady.” Lal’s words were gentler than his brother’s. “I
know this is all confusing right now, but you need to trust us.”
I remembered Ma’s letter, but I hesitated, looking from one
brother to the other, and then finally down at myself. As I did,
I realized I was a mess. The scratch on my cheek was still
bleeding a little, my now one-armed, hoodless sweatshirt was
covered in demon snot, and I was pretty sure I smelled like a
skunk after a hard night partying with some dung beetles.
Neel dug a grubby-looking handkerchief out of his pocket,
but I shook my head. I didn’t meet his eyes, but swiped at my
face again with my sleeve.
 “I’m not a damsel in distress, you know; I can take care of
myself.” Despite my words, my voice sounded shaky.
Neel’s mouth quivered a little, somewhere between a smile
and a smirk. “Fine, suit yourself.”
“You must hurry and pack a few things,” Lal urged. “We
should be on our way to find your parents.”
A cloud parted within me. Ma and Baba!
“Are they okay? You guys know where they are?”
“I thought you didn’t want our help,” Neel reminded me
with an annoying raise of one eyebrow. “I thought you could
take care of yourself.”
“Brother, for shame!” Lal scolded.
“That’s right.” A flash of anger shot across Neel’s face.
“The shame of the family, that’s me.”
“That’s not what I—” began Lal before I interrupted the
brotherly interchange.
“Could we get back to the part where you guys tell me
where my parents are?”
“They have passed through the mouth of the beast into that
other place,” Lal said.
I really, really hoped this “mouth of the beast” thing was
some kind of metaphor. My heart hammered as I thought about
the demon’s lolling tongue, its enormous teeth.
“Are you trying to tell me they got eaten by the rakkhosh?”
“No.” Neel turned his back to me as he tightened his
horse’s saddle. “Not literally eaten.”
“How do you get eaten un-literally?”
 “They have been transported into another dimension.” Lal
spoke like he was reciting something he’d memorized. “These
protective spells—like the one that was over your family—
they are very unstable once they reach their expiration date.”
I knew he wasn’t talking about spoiled milk. “It’s my
twelfth birthday,” I blurted. But the brothers nodded, like they
already knew that. Everywhere in my body felt shaken and
scared and raw. I needed some answers—now.
I made my voice as firm as I could. “What. Happened. To.
My. Parents?”
“You wouldn’t understand. It’s too complicated to explain
…” Neel grumbled.
“Imagine”—Lal pointed dreamily to the sky—“when a star
is dying. It grows bigger, then smaller, and finally it implodes
into a black hole.”
Okaaay. No matter how stupid Neel thought I was, I knew
about black holes. I’d been to the planetarium. I even loved
watching that public television science show with Shady Sadie
the Science Lady.
“But what does that have to do with my parents? Or spells?
Or rakkhosh?”
“The spell that was protecting your family has, well, run
out of gas,” Lal stammered.
“Gas?”
“The spell’s begun to lose power,” Neel said. “As it gets
closer to imploding, it first shoots the matter within it—your
parents—into a new place, a new dimension.”
I struggled to form a question. “But … I’m still here.”
“It must have been placed over them specifically, or it
could be there’s an additional spell protecting you,” Lal said.
“Anyway, an expired spell also makes everything around it
unstable—in this situation, the boundaries between the various
dimensions.”
“Which is how the rakkhosh came into your world,”
interjected Neel. “We’ve been tracking him since he got your
expired spell scent. There’ll be more where he came from if
we don’t get you out of here.”
My head was spinning. Spells. Dimensions. Black holes.
And my … expired spell scent? Like, eww!
Then I remembered something I’d learned from Shady
Sadie the Science Lady’s show, as well as endless reruns of
that old outer space program, Star Travels.
“But nothing can survive inside a black hole, not light, not
matter …” My words tapered off as my voice was seriously
wobbly. I coughed.
“You are unfortunately correct. Most of what you
understand to be black holes manifest in other dimensions as
demons—terribly greedy rakkhosh—who gobble up
everything around themselves,” Lal said.
“Think of them like giant galactic vacuum cleaners,” Neel
added totally unhelpfully.
The vivid image made my throat feel even more like it was
closing up. I let out a terrified squeak. He was talking about
my parents being hoovered up by some outer-space-
phenomenon-slash-hungry-demon. This was no joke.
“But enough with the astronomy lesson,” continued Neel.
“All you need to know is that there’s still some time before the
spell completely collapses and goes all … celestial stardust.
Which is why we’d better boogie.” He pointed me toward the
house. “Now.”
 The princes stayed by the horses and the snoring demon on
the lawn while I rushed through the disaster movie that was
once my home. The bedrooms were still intact, and the
bathroom worked, even though it had a new skylight courtesy
of demon renovations. I threw on a fresh T-shirt and hoodie,
then tossed a toothbrush and change of clothes in my
backpack. I tried to call Zuzu, but only got her family’s
voicemail.
“The Tomopolous family is visiting Mount Olympus right
now. The Mount Olympus Diner and Bowl-o-Rama, that is!
Come to the heart of Parsippany to strike the best baklava this
side of Delphi! And if you’d like to leave a message for
Marina, Costa, Athena, Alex, Frankie, Niko, Zuzu, Grandma
Yaya, or Zeus the dog, do so after the beep! Opa!”
What was I supposed to do? Tell her a demon had broken
into my house? That my parents were trapped in an imploding
spell? That I was about to fly off with some princes to rescue
my family from an intergalactic demonic vaccuum cleaner?
In the end, I fudged the truth.
“This is a message for Zuzu. Uh, this is Kiran. Hi,
everybody. Listen, we, uh, have some unexpected out-of-town
guests. From, uh, really far away. And I … um … I need to do
something for my parents. Something really important. We’ll
be back … probably in a few days. I guess … um … you could
tell ’em at school, and … collect my homework.” I was getting
a little choked up, so I thought I’d better end the message.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be …” The recording cut me off before I got
to “okay.”
I stared stupidly at the phone in my hand. Now what?
“Hurry up, Prin-cess!” I heard Neel yell. “The big guy’s
gonna wake up soon!”
 At the last minute, I shoved Ma’s red-and-gold wedding
sari into my pack, along with her small jewelry box. My eyes
fell on a framed family photograph on Baba’s nightstand. It
was taken in front of the Convenience Emporium. My mother
was reverently holding a statue of the blue-skinned Lord
Krishna as a fat baby, a stolen dab of butter in his hand. Right
next to her, my father sported a T-shirt we carried in the store
embossed with a New Jersey Turnpike emblem. And I was in
between them with a Giant Gulpie in my hand, smiling like a
loon.
“I may not have always been the perfect daughter,” I
muttered, “but I swear I’ll get you back.”
I threw the photo in my bag and raced out the door.
The rakkhosh was still on the ground, but rubbed its closed
eyes with its enormous hands. I held my breath and ran by.
“No time to be lost, my lady!” Lalkamal urged. “It’s time to
go home!”
“Come on, get a move on!” Neel waved me toward his
horse. “Let’s get out of this place!”
I felt a last pang of hesitation. “Wait a minute!” I looked
from brother to brother: one smiling, the other frowning.
“This”—I gestured to the rubble in front of me—“is my
home!”
“Does she not know?”
Neel scowled. “I guess not.”
“Know what?”
“This is not your home, my lady,” Lal said. “You are from a
place far away, a Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and
Thirteen Rivers.”
 “We don’t have time for this, dude,” Neel urged. “Just grab
her; let’s go.”
“No one’s grabbing me!”
Behind me, there was a groaning noise as the demon started
waking.
“My lady, you have always known you were different?”
I nodded.
“Perhaps even, not of this world?”
I stared.
There was a low-pitched moan from the direction of the
demon. Both horses were flapping their wings and stamping in
fear.
“Oh, wake up!” Neel snapped. “No one ever told you about
how they found you in a clay pot floating down the River of
Dreams?”
“What?” My eyes widened. “How did you …”
And then he said it.
“No one ever told you that you were really a princess?”
There it was. The truth. Staring at me right in the face this
whole time.
(Yeah, you don’t have to say it. I know it’s a little ironic in
light of my previous attitude toward princesses in general.)
“Hai, mai, khai!” The ground rumbled beneath my feet.
“Run, Princess Kiran!” Lal yelled.
“I’m riding Snowy,” I called, sprinting toward Lal’s white
horse. This time, it definitely winked at me.
The horses had just launched off the ground when I looked
down and saw the frothy-mouthed demon bolting toward us. It
stood on my front lawn, shrieking as we sailed higher and
higher into the night sky.
I was flying.
No. Way.
I was flying.
Cool wind whipped through my clothes and hair as we
glided into the night. Despite everything, I was in awe. If I
were to reach out, I could pluck the very moon from the sky
and put it in my pocket. The houses below me were like teeny
toy villages, but I wasn’t freaked out. Instead, I laughed out
loud. Even the stars seemed to be twinkling at my pleasure.
“It is most wonderous, is it not?” Lal pointed out a few
constellations. “You know, every one of those stars is a spell.”
“Are we riding into outer space?” Despite our lack of
pressurized space suits and oxygen tanks, it didn’t seem like
an unreasonable question to ask.
“Alas, no. Just a different dimension.”
Oh, well, that explained it perfectly.
Not.
I gulped in some crisp night air, feeling strangely new. My
parents were missing. My house was a wreck. I was flying off
to who knows where. The situation sucked, to put it mildly.
But I’d faced down the scariest Halloween monster I’d ever
met, and I hadn’t hidden or backed away or anything. I’d
acted. I’d fought. I’d done something useful and brave. And
that part of it felt kind of, well, amazing.
 As we rode, I found myself actually relaxing, if that makes
any sense. It was super easy to talk to Lal. Turned out, he was
a great sky-tour guide, and kept pointing out things like cloud
formations, flocks of Canadian geese, a shooting star—which
was a spell being cast, he explained. After a while I couldn’t
see the ground below us. The funny thing was, I wasn’t scared
of falling—not at all. I got the feeling I’d always lived up there
with the sky and the stars. Maybe it was all that curtainless
sleeping in the moonlight, but it felt comfortable and familiar,
like the moon itself was looking out for me.
Lal even let me take the reins. Neel was right; I’d never
been on a horse before (riding lessons weren’t exactly in our
family budget), but Snowy was gentle and responded right
away to my touch. A good ways ahead, Neel’s black horse—
whom I’d started to think of as Midnight—bucked and snorted
as he galloped in the air. I could only see his vague outline by
the thousands of twinkling stars that lit the way.
Lal caught my gaze and sighed. “My brother is so much
better than me at almost everything.”
Lal’s words startled me, because they were tinged with that
same wistful jealousy I thought I’d seen on Neel’s face back
on my front lawn.
“That’s not true.” I stumbled over my words in my effort to
be reassuring. “You’re brave, and nice, and very ha— um, I
mean, very princely.” I almost said the word handsome but
stopped myself barely in time.
“You think?” I couldn’t see Lal’s face, but he sounded
nervous. “I’ve been working on it, the princeliness, I mean.”
“Oh, it’s going realy well!” I said in a rush. “You have
excellent manners and perfect posture and great … erm,
diction!”
 “Many gracious thanks, my lady!” Lal said stiffly. Then his
voice lost its confidence again. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be
as smart and strong as my brother.”
Wow. Neel was a lot more of a bully than I thought. I
couldn’t believe he would make Lal feel so bad about himself.
Way uncool.
We rode for a while longer in silence, until I started to
yawn something fierce.
“Sleep, dear princess,” Lal said, taking back the reins. “It is
a long distance to the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and
Thirteen Rivers.”
“And we’ll find my parents there?” I rested my exhausted
head on Snowy’s mane. I could hear the horse’s breathing,
steady and low, like a waterfall—and imagined I could even
hear the river of his blood flowing in his veins. I was asleep
before I heard Lal’s answer.
The dawn was already breaking when I opened my eyes.
My butt was sore from spending all night on a horse’s back,
and I had a wicked charley horse in my left leg. I imagined it
was like being on an overnight flight—except without the stale
air and packaged peanuts.
Lal was saying something to me, pointing to the ground
below, but the wind whipped his voice away. I shook my head,
not understanding, until he repeated, “We have arrived! The
transit corridor!”
The horses flew toward the ground, like planes preparing
for a landing. My ears popped and I did the trick of
swallowing hard. It didn’t work. (I’ve read you can also chew
gum, but I didn’t have any, or, like, hold your nose and blow,
but I was afraid that would risk unplanned boogerage in my
hand, so I didn’t do that either.)
 After hours of riding separately, Neel pulled his horse up
next to Snowy, and now the two winged horses flew side by
side, whinnying at each other.
“Your parents are beyond the transit corridor, Princess,”
Neel yelled. “To get to them we’ll first have to get you through
the checkpoint.”
“I suppose you possess the appropriate documentation?”
Lal asked near my ear.
“Documentation?” I gulped. The horses were coming down
fast. And all I could see below me were dusty rocks and red
earth.
“You know,” Lal clarified, “an Earth exilation notification,
a royal-to-nonroyal cover pass, a tweet from the president?”
“Um.” I closed my eyes as the horses finally landed in a
vast canyon. The red-brown ground was dry, without a sign of
any tree, bush, or shrub. More bald than our front yard even,
and that was saying a lot. Weirdly shaped outcroppings of
stone, and a giant mesa-like mountain marked the eerie
landscape.
Where were we? Something about the spires of red rocks
seemed familiar, like I’d seen a picture of this place before.
“Are we in … Arizona?” I asked when we finally
dismounted. I stretched my aching legs. Snowy pawed the
ground like he was stretching his legs too.
“It’s the biggest non-wormhole transit point to other
dimensions in the U.S.” Neel looped Midnight’s reins loosely
in his hands. “Even though the local government doesn’t like
it.”
“So what kind of papers do you have, lady?” Lal asked
again. “You’ll need them to get through here.”
 Why were they so obsessed with my “documentation”?
“I have a birthday card from my parents, and …” I don’t
know why, but I hesitated before telling the princes about the
map. “Yeah, just the card.”
“A birthday card?” Neel snapped. “Who travels with just a
birthday card? How are we supposed to get you past the transit
officer without getting snacked on?”
“Princess Kiran will prevail. Have faith, Brother.” Unlike
Neel, who looked totally rested, Lal seemed a little tired after
the long ride. Not that it made him any less handsome, but his
fourth eyelash from the right definitely looked less curly than
the others. Or maybe it was that I’d gotten to know him a little
better and could see him more like a regular person.
Lal peered at me with a hopeful expression even as Neel
continued to scowl, biting his nails.
“You must be good at riddles?” Lal asked.
“Riddles?”
Zuzu’s brother Niko was obsessed with dumb jokes and
riddles, and was always trying them out on us, but I couldn’t
see why that would be helpful.
I squinted against the harsh sun. It was like we’d ridden all
night and landed on some alien planet. There was nothing
here. Just rocks. No train station, no airport, no subway
platform. Not a soul—animal, human, or even monster. Where
was this transit thingy the boys were talking about?
Neel stomped off, kicking red rocks and making a mini
dust storm as Lal continued, “Please—you must be familiar
with puzzles and logical games?”
“A bit,” I admitted.
 “All this way, and Princess K-pop gets eaten by the transit
officer because she has no papers!” Neel shouted to no one in
particular.
“Chill, dude! She won’t be consumed by the officer, all
right?” Lal said in a voice so different than his usual cultured
way of talking that I realized how much of an effort he put into
his princely accent. But I didn’t have time to worry about that
now, because I really didn’t like what I was hearing.
“Consumed? Who’s going to consume me?” Why did the
boys keep putting me and consumed in the same sentence?
“No one, no one will consume you!” But Lal was looking
worried too. Which wasn’t comforting. “The transit corridor is
the place where, in passing from one world to the next, the
officer checks your papers, makes sure all is in order.”
“Like the security lines at an airport?” I took a swig from
the water bottle Lal supplied. The water was warm and
metallic and did nothing to make me less thirsty.
“Oh, sure.” Neel ground a good-size rock to dust under his
heel, making me wonder about his workout routine. “If airport
officers were ten feet tall and had a taste for human bones.”
“The transit officer is a rakkhosh?” My stomach spasmed. I
might have discovered some secret demon-fighting gene in
myself, but it didn’t make them any less scary. In fact, all the
confidence I had felt last night seemed ground to dust this
morning, like the stone under Neel’s foot.
“Not a rakkhosh precisely,” Lal said, “but a sort of an
unusual fellow who has, er, been known to eat individuals
without the proper documents.”
“He’s been known to eat people? Are you kidding me?”
My head ached. It was all too much—my parents’
disappearance, the surprise trick-or-treaters, the demons, the
spells, the risk of death and dismemberment at every turn.
Besides which, I was hungry and thirsty and had just had a
really crappy birthday, all in all.
I felt like the last day had been one of those superfast,
upside-down roller coasters at the amusement park. (I actually
really hate those—once I yuked corn dogs after riding one.
Zuzu didn’t help by laughing her head off.) Only now I felt
sick and I wanted to go home.
“I’m sorry guys, I can’t do this anymore.” My voice shook
and I swiped furiously at my nose. “I mean, killer demons?
Different dimensions? Black holes? I’m just an ordinary kid
from New Jersey. I can’t deal with all this!”
Lal’s face softened and he looked like he was going to say
something nice, but his brother cut him off with a furious
exclamation. “Don’t be such a 2-D!”
I whipped around. “What did you call me?”
“A flatfoot, a ruler, a 2-D!” Neel ground out the words like
they were curses.
Which maybe they were, by Lal’s reaction. “Brother,
please!”
But Neel kept going. “People from your world think that
everything is so easily measured and explained—that
everyone’s exactly the same, paper dolls in some two-
dimensional universe! Well, it doesn’t work that way, all right?
Not everything makes sense and not everything in life is fair.
The quicker you figure that out, the better off you’ll be!”
My fear was quickly turning to fury, but still, I squirmed
inside as I thought about Neel’s words. Maybe I did want
everything to be easy and the same. How many times had I
wished my parents would just give me a straight explanation
for something? How many times had I wanted them to be like
everyone else? And now they were missing, and maybe if I’d
actually believed all their crazy stories, I would know how to
get them back.
“You can’t just decide to forget who you are because its
inconvenient, Princess,” Neel barreled on. “Life doesn’t work
like that. It’s messy and complicated and everything’s not
always peaches and unicorns. There’s dangerous things out
there, things none of us understand. But you don’t just quit the
first time you get a little scared!”
“I am not scared!” I shouted. But I was. I’d almost just
been eaten. My parents were missing. And I’d just realized my
whole life had basically been a lie.
“What do you know anyway? I mean, peaches and
unicorns? What are you, like six years old?” My face felt
positively radioactive.
Neel grabbed at my dusty sweatshirt. “Don’t you want to
see the people you know as your parents again?”
“They are my parents!” I flung his hand off my arm. “And
I’m going to get them back no matter what it takes! What have
you done to them?”
“Nothing! Of course we have done nothing!” Lal stepped in
between us. “We were sent by them to help you. As my
brother has said, they’re beyond the transit corridor. The
officers tend to close the corridors on a whim, so it would be
best if we could pass through now.” Lal gave Neel a warning
look. “All your questions will be answered on the other side.”
“Sure, right, if she’s not made into an appetizer!” Neel
glared at me.
I glared right back. I had no intention of being eaten, no
matter which course of a meal. All the worry and confusion
I’d felt just a second ago was now replaced by a new resolve,
and a strong desire to punch Neel in the nose.
“Trust yourself, Princess. When you’re faced with a task
that seems too big, it’s all you can do,” Lal said quietly.
“Okay.” I took a big breath. Even if Neel was more
annoying than anyone I’d ever met, these princes obviously
held the key to finding Ma and Baba. “Let’s do this.”
Lal, Neel, the two horses, and I picked our way over the
rocky ground. As we approached the base of the high mesa,
Lal turned to me. I noticed Neel still wasn’t meeting my eyes
since we’d argued.
“This ancient mountain is known by many names. But we
call it Mandhara—the mountain of concentration. It divides
our dimensions, but it also unites them.”
“The mountain of concentration, got it.”
“You have to know within yourself, for certain, that you are
committed to climbing it, committed to this journey,” Lal
explained. “Or else you will never reach the cave on the
summit.”
I stole a glance at Neel. He was shading his eyes and
peering upward. I did the same. From where we were standing,
I could barely make out the top.
All righty, a mountain that would go on forever unless I
was set on climbing it.
I took a big breath, nodding at Lal. “This is how I get my
life back, huh?”
“Yes, Princess Kiran. This is the first step in finding what
you seek.”
“Just Kiran is fine.” I rubbed my aching neck.
 “All right, Just Kiran, we should be going now,” said Lal
with such a sweet smile I couldn’t correct him, especially in
front of his judgy big brother.
“Onward and upward, I guess.”
We climbed for what felt like hours in relative silence
except for an occasional whinny and a grunt from me as I
stubbed my toe on a stone. The sun was up, but the higher we
got, the more the desert winds ripped through us, biting at our
skin. My bones ached and my stomach growled. I wished I’d
stuck some sandesh in my pockets too.
“Why don’t we just have the horses take us up there?” I
panted. It was so much higher than it looked. The animals
were doing well on the hard rocks, but neither of them had
unfurled their wings.
“It is a winged horse no-fly zone.” Even though that didn’t
exactly clarify the situation, I decided not to ask any further. I
didn’t want Neel to call me a 2-D again.
I also didn’t ask why it was taking so long to get to the
cave. Probably something to do with my concentration or
commitment. Was I ready to face my real identity? Was I
ready to see the place that I came from? The truth was, I didn’t
really have a choice. Turning away from this journey would
mean forgetting about my parents and letting them die. And
there was no way that I was willing to do that.
I tried to focus my mind, visualizing getting to the top. It
seemed to work, because all of a sudden I could see the
plateau of the mesa. And on the top, a dark cave. But a few
yards before its entrance, something very strange blocked the
way. After no indications of civilization whatsoever, we
suddenly faced two roped-off lines going in different
directions. They were the kind you see in front of theaters or in
airports—waist-high metal pillars with black vinyl ropes
hooked to them. The lines were marked with large signs. The
first one read:
Those upstanding royalty, citizens, animals, and demons
holding papers (this way)
While the second said:
All the rest of you good-for-nothing undocumented
scoundrels (this way)
No one else was visible for miles, but the roped lines
threaded their way over the ground in front of the cave. Who’d
put them there? And who was here to check which way I
went? But my question was answered as the princes headed
toward the right side, and a disembodied voice barked, “This
line is for those with papers only!”
Lal and Neel fished inside their pockets and pulled out
papers, which they waved around in front of them. Then Neel
reached over to each horse’s saddlebag and pulled out what
must have been the horses’ official papers.
I took a big breath and headed all by myself toward the
left-hand line, the one for “undocumented scoundrels.”
“This place could use some immigration reform,” I
grumbled.
“We’ll meet you on the other side, Just Kiran!” Lal called
with a nervous smile. “No matter what happens, answer
honestly, and do not be afraid.”
Neel gave me a hard look. “And if that doesn’t work, for
the Goddess’s sake, run like crazy!”
For a few minutes, we threaded our way through our
individual lines. It was slow going. The ropes herded you this
way and that—like the lines in an airport—so you couldn’t
walk straight but had to keep turning left, right, left, right.
At each corner, there was another ridiculous sign. The first
read:
Drink all your liquids. Take off your shoes. Hop on one
foot.
I looked over at Lal and Neel, and saw that they were
hopping away, curly toed shoes in hand. I slipped off my
combat boots and did the same. Until I came to the second
sign.
No drinking of liquids. No bare feet. And unless you can
provide evidence of being part toad, kangaroo, or jumping
juju beast, stop hopping!
I put my boots back on and kept walking, until I came to
the third sign.
All bows and arrows, knives, whips, maces, clubs, swords,
and magic wands must pass through the X-ray machine.
No nunchakus, poisonous darts, or firearms permitted.
And then:
P.S. If your arms shoot fire, that’s okay. But you will be
liable for anything or anyone you accidentally set on fire.
And you must provide your own fire extinguisher. If you
do not have your own fire extinguisher, one will not be
provided for you.
 Miranda rights for people with fire-shooting arms. Now I’d
seen everything.
Up until this point, I’d been able to see Lal, Neel, and the
horses turning this way and that in their own line. Now they
disappeared behind a huge boulder, probably to have their
weapons X-rayed. My heart sank to see the last flick of
Snowy’s tail.
I realized I must be getting closer to the guard’s station,
because the next sign read:
Do not sneeze, cough, snot, or drool on the transit officer. If
you must, use conveniently located spittoons for the
appropriate deposition of your bodily fluids.
And then, in smaller letters:
A spittoon is a spit-bucket, you illiterate swine.
I remembered being covered in the rakkhosh’s reeking snot.
I looked around for a spittoon, but didn’t see one. I continued
walking until I saw the next sign.
Any rakkhosh, khokkosh, magical beast, or half human
caught eating a spittoon will be prosecuted. Any human
caught eating one will become very ill. And probably die.
(Stop eating the transit spittoons, we know who you are.)
The line came to an end a few feet away from the entrance
of the cave. In front of me was a podium—the kind of stand
Principal Chen used during auditorium assemblies at school.
On it was a teeny tiny bell and a sign that read:
Ring here for transit officer. Be not afraid. (If you can help
it.)
I looked around the deserted hilltop and down into the
rocky valley. I wasn’t anywhere near Alexander Hamilton
Middle School or Parsippany anymore. I felt very small and
very far away from anything I knew. What I would give to see
a familiar face. Even giggly-mean Jovi’s.
The wind shrieked around me, lifting my hair with jagged
fingers. I shuddered.
There was nowhere to go but forward. I had to get to my
parents before they got sucked into some alternate dimension
or black hole or spoiled spell or whatever. I couldn’t—
wouldn’t—even imagine the alternative. As weird as they
were, they were my weirdos, and nothing in the universe could
ever be right without them.
With a courage that came from somewhere deep but still
unfamiliar, I picked up the petite bell with two fingers. Then I
shook it.
I didn’t hear anything, so I shook it again. It wasn’t until
the third shake that a deafening gong-like noise from the bell
startled me into almost dropping it.
In a few seconds, the ground beneath me began to shake.
And then the most horrible-looking creature emerged from the
darkness of the cave. I sucked in my breath.
The transit officer wasn’t as tall as the rakkhosh had been
and looked nothing like that hairy, warty demon. Instead, it
had a face like a cross between a lion and a rooster. On its
head were a ginormous crown and three curved horns. Beneath
its googly eyes and hooked nose was a toothy mouth. I took in
the giraffe’s neck, the man’s arms and chest, the porcupine’s
quill-filled tail. And I saw the spike-covered club that the
creature dragged behind it on the ground. I swallowed hard.
Then it … smiled at me? *double gulp*
The beast shouted:
“Fear not, fear not, fear not! You won’t be maimed or
shot!
 Truth be told I can’t hold my own against one so strong,
I’m a bag of bones!
Sharp horns have I, but I use them not, my joints are old,
my muscles shot.
I have a club with spiky ends, but I won’t hit you, my
dearest friend!
Come closer, chum, into my cave. You’re tasty, young,
and far too brave!
Are you afraid? Are you insane? Do you want me all
your blood to drain?
Myself and I and my nine boys, we’ll grab your legs like
two stick toys.
You’re such a doll, you’re such a dear, we’ll eat you up if
you have such fears!”
It took a forcible effort to shut my mouth, which had
dropped stupidly open during the officer’s speech. I couldn’t
think of anything to say. The creature’s words and expression
seemed—if not pleasant—at least not actively harmful. On the
other hand, I’d rather not meet the transit officer’s nine mini-
mes, and having my blood drained as a punishment for being
afraid didn’t seem like an ideal plan either.
“Um … are you the transit officer?” I finally asked.
“No papers, eh? That’s such a shame.” The creature’s eyes
went buggy. “Well then, we’ll have to play a game.”
“What kind of game?” I wondered if the princes were
through their checkpoint yet. Would they rescue me if the
game this overgrown chicken was thinking about involved
having me for lunch?
“Answer these, my pretty, please!” The officer clucked.
“What’s black and white and—”
 Really? Was this a joke?
“And read all over?” I finished. “A newspaper!” My fifth-
grade teacher Mrs. Ury had actually taught me that one—red
and read were homophones—when you spoke them aloud they
sounded the same and that was the root of the joke.
The creature seemed so sad, I actually felt sorry for it. “Try
another one,” I encouraged.
“What has four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, three
legs in the evening—”
“Man!” I practically laughed as I blurted out the answer. It
was the old question that the Sphinx was supposed to have
asked the Greek hero Oedipus. Human beings crawled in the
morning—hence the four legs—they walked on two when they
were grown, and then walked with a cane when they were old.
I’d seen that one on a documentary I’d watched at Zuzu’s
house about the ancient Greeks.
The transit officer was pacing around now, stomping its
giant rooster feet. I was careful to stay out of the way of its
porcupine tail as it moved back and forth. But something like
hope was blossoming in the pit of my stomach. Maybe I’d
make it through this test and be able to rescue Ma and Baba
after all.
“I reach to the sky, I touch the ground, sometimes I leave,
but I’m always around?” The officer’s chicken wattle wobbled
in agitation.
This was an oldie but goodie from one of Niko’s joke
books.
“Yeah, I know that one too; it’s a tree,” I said. “Listen,
don’t get upset. It’s not your fault. Can I go now? I bet my
friends will be worried about me.”
 This was obviously the wrong thing to say, because the
officer’s bloodshot eyes narrowed in my direction. My heart
gave a jerky leap.
“Friends?” it spat. “Kik, kik, ri gee! You’ve got friends,
have you? Oh my, oh gee!”
I licked my dry lips. “They’re not really good friends.”
“Those were just practices, my pretty, my sweet,” the
officer huffed, baring its yellow teeth. “If you don’t get this
one, I’ll eat your feet!
“The ocean’s pearl, a grain of sand
More precious than all the gold in the land
Life would be flat, life would be bland
Without this diamond in your hand.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. I hadn’t heard this one before.
And now the transit officer was angry with me. I wondered
even if I were to get the answer right, would it ever let me go?
“The ocean’s pearl?” I stalled.
“Kluk!”
“Life would be flat?”
“Kik ri gi!” the creature crowed. It was suddenly looking
much happier. “Into my stomach with thee!”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I’m thinking,” I protested.
“Besides, I probably don’t taste very good.”
“Princesses taste so very nice! I won’t even need a spice!”
At the officer’s words, the childhood nursery rhyme about
“sugar and spice and everything nice” popped into my head.
“Hold on.” I grinned. “I’ve got it!”
 “No, you don’t! All lies and stuff! Princess makes a big old
bluff!” But the officer looked worried. Its spiny tail swished in
the rocky soil.
What’s from the ocean, like a grain of sand, a diamond in
your hand? I got a flash of a day trip I had taken with my
parents last summer to Atlantic City: the surf, the sand, the
gritty taste of the waves on my lips.
I smirked confidently at the officer. “Salt.”
“Kik ra koo!” The beast’s googly eyes rotated wildly. “Into
my gizzard with you!”
“Wait a minute. Stop! That’s not fair. I got the right answer;
it’s salt!”
The creature banged its club on the side of the cave,
causing a small avalanche of stones. I ducked, covering my
head with my hands.
“That’s not fair, that’s not right! I won’t let you go without
a fight!” The officer stomped its foot. Its cheeks were now wet
with enormous tears and gurgling noises came from its beak.
Before I had a chance to say anything else, the transit
officer lay down on the ground, kicking its arms and legs.
“What will my supervisor say,” it wailed, “now that I’ve let
you get away?”
It was having a monster of a tantrum. For a minute, I was
tempted to give the giant rooster a time-out in its coop. Ma
would have never stood for such bad behavior.
“If the princess gets me fired,” the officer shrieked, “who
will feed these boys I’ve sired?”
“Shh! Stop crying so loud!” I urged, trying to edge by the
flailing monster.
 Just my luck, all this yelling was going to wake up his
entire family of younger, stronger, monstrous offspring. And I
really didn’t feel like getting divided up as an after-school
snack among this guy’s nine hungry kids!
Waa hoo hoo!” the creature cried, its face on the ground.
“Boo hoo kik ri goo!”
“It’s okay, don’t cry! Shh!” I whispered, scooching past the
hiccuping and snotting transit officer. My heart was beating
like crazy in my throat. Would I get away in time?
When I heard the sound of yawning coming from the cave,
I stopped trying to be quiet and just flat-out ran as fast as I
could.
“Cluck! Cluck! Clacket! What’s all the racket?” someone
called. I didn’t wait to see if the officer would answer, but kept
running until I was well out of sight of the transit corridor. I
ran so fast my gym teachers would be very proud. Even Mr.
Taylor, whom I had accidentally—and completely nonfatally!
—injured once. I only stopped to catch my breath when I was
sure I couldn’t hear giant monster chicken sounds cackling
behind me anymore.
After a few minutes of no younger versions of the transit
officer chasing me down, I finally let myself relax a little. I
was safe. At least for now.
As barren as the previous landscape had been, I was
shocked to see the change on the other side of the mountain. I
was overlooking a lush valley intersected by several rivers
whose source was a snowcapped peak in the far distance.
Beyond that peak, I was pretty sure I could see a sparkling
ocean dancing with the serene blue sky.
I was finally here, in the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans
and Thirteen Rivers. Now, just to find the princes and get on
with rescuing my parents. How much time did we have to get
to them before the spell “expired”? I had no way of knowing.
Going up the mountain had been a hard scramble over
sharp rocks. Now I ambled down a grassy slope. I took off my
sweatshirt and tied it around my waist, enjoying the warm sun
on my skin. My skin. I reached for my bandanna to tie it over
my scar. But then I remembered I didn’t have one. I’d changed
clothes at home before we’d left. Crap. I never went anywhere
without long sleeves on, or else something to cover up the
weird, U-shaped scar on my upper arm—like a strange, saggy
pair of glasses. I felt relieved that I’d been wearing my
sweatshirt during the trip from New Jersey, so Lal and Neel
hadn’t seen my hideous blemishes all hanging out there in the
open the whole time. Of course, Neel had already seen my arm
scar once, and I’d be lucky if he ever forgot that awful sight.
I’d have to find a scarf or something to tie over it before I
found the brothers, or at least just put my hoodie back on.
It had been late fall on the other side of the mountain, but
here it seemed to be spring. There were riots of blossoms on
all the trees that gave the valley a festive air. A family of
bottle-green dragonflies zoomed past my face, and fat bees
feasted on the wildflower carpet beneath my feet. As I walked
farther down, I realized there was another surprise waiting for
me at the bottom of the valley. I was no longer alone!
A few yards in front of me was a marketplace. The bazaar
was right next to a babbling stream from which I could see
fish leaping out, their golden bodies catching and reflecting
the sunlight. I crossed over a little bridge and onto the dusty
main path through the center of the market. Off of it, countless
little alleyways zigzagged this way and that.
The buildings lining the main street seemed to be built by
the same architect as those ramshackle alleyways, because
they zigzagged too. They were slapped together haphazardly,
with the top floors at slight angles to the bottom floors, so that
nothing exactly lined up. Entire rooms seemed to be added on
as afterthoughts and stuck out like pimples from the upper
stories of some buildings. A twisted little pink house leaned so
heavily on the patched green one next door it seemed to be
riding piggyback. Bright saris and other laundry waved at me
from the flat rooftops. On one crooked clothesline, I saw rows
of colorful bills, each clipped with a large clothespin, as if
someone had just washed out his life’s savings. Everything
looked odd and precarious. The entire place seemed to be
thumbing its nose at any principles of sense or gravity.
Looking for the princes, I scanned the faces in the crowd,
which were both unfamiliar and familiar at the same time.
Brown skin, black hair—it was a strange feeling to be around
so many people who looked like me. Like I’d somehow come
home to a place I never knew I belonged. But none of the
faces belonged to Lal or Neel.
“Have you seen two brothers—one in red, one in blue?” I
asked a rikshaw puller, who looked at me blankly.
“Ride? Ride? You want a ride?” the man asked.
I asked everyone I could as I made my way down the
bustling street. Most people ignored me or just shook their
heads and kept going. The crowd pushed me this way and that,
and I had to shove my way through with my elbows
sometimes. I walked past men with overloaded pushcarts,
sleeping cows and water buffalos, footpath stalls selling
everything from shoe polish to tooth powder to mountains of
dizzying-scented flowers.
“For you, lady!” Someone dropped a thick white-and-pink
garland around my neck. The scent was heady, the color of the
pink flowers blinding.
 “No, I don’t think so.” I returned the garland as politely as I
could, then sneezed. The pollen count on these things was
probably through the roof.
“You should learn to smell the flowers.” The merchant
shook his finger at me.
The market was starting to feel less like a homecoming and
more like an overload on all my senses. I hadn’t made it five
steps before I was accosted again.
“Don’t diet—buy EZ Fit glass bangles!” a roly-poly lady in
a polka-dot sari bellowed. She balanced a flat basket on her
head. “Changes to fit your changing body!
“Hey, slippery,” she barked, poking me in the arm with her
fleshy finger. Ow. “You buy some bangles from me.”
When I shook my head, she plunked her reed basket on the
ground and crouched beside it. The folds on her belly jiggled
as she worked so that she looked like a big bowl of polka-dot
Jell-O.
“I really don’t think—” I began, but she pretended that she
couldn’t hear me. The woman dug through a sparkling array of
green, magenta, turquoise, and gold bracelets until she found
what she was searching for.
“I have your color!” she insisted, pulling out a dozen silver
and pink bangles that she slipped on her own robust arm. As
she slipped them off, she grabbed my arm and began shoving
the huge bracelets over my wrist. Strange thing was, they
shrunk to fit me perfectly.
“Uh, no, thanks.” I pulled the bangles back off and dropped
them into her basket with a clatter. “I don’t like pink.”
“It’s not a crime to like pretty things.” I caught the lady
peering at my scar, and I put my hand over my arm to cover it.
The bangle seller shrugged her beefy shoulders, heaving the
basket on her head again. “You should eat something, maybe
then you wouldn’t be so grumpy.”
“I’m sorry, they were very nice,” I began. “Maybe in a
different color …”
But she was already hawking her wares again. “EZ Fit
bangles—for the generously proportioned and the skinny-butt
offspring of slimy snake creatures alike!”
What the heck did that mean? I got the feeling that maybe
the bangle-selling lady wasn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the
drawer.
On the other hand, maybe she was right about one thing. I
was pretty hungry. Maybe if I ate something, I’d feel less
overwhelmed. As if on cue, my stomach moaned. I looked
around at the signs on the shopkeepers’ stalls.
FRIED DRIED COCKROACHES. ALSO PILLOWCASES—
DEEP-FRIED OR NOW, FOR YOU HEALTH NUTS,
STEAMED.
As ravenous as I was, neither item seemed particularly
appetizing. I stopped by a stall that was selling kati rolls—egg
and meat with onions and chilis, folded into fluffy parathas,
and then rolled up in a paper carrier. I inhaled the first one in
about three bites and then bought three more with Ma’s rupees,
eating as I walked. I rolled my eyes a little as they filled my
mouth and stomach with spicy goodness. As I finished the last
one, ineffectively wiping my oily fingers on the oily wrapper,
something caught my attention.
Lazy? A slowpoke? Running from a rakkhosh? Try Mr. Madan
Mohan’s motivational motion device!
(PATENT PENDING)
Huh. I had certainly run from a rakkhosh, and there was
nothing to say I wouldn’t do so again in the process of
rescuing my parents. This seemed like something I should
investigate.
“Mr. Madan? Mr. Mohan?” I called from the counter.
From the back of the stall emerged a little man whose
curling moustache was at least the length side to side as he
was tall. He could barely peer over the counter, and stood on
his toes to do so with an air of suspicion.
“It’s Mr. Madan Mohan, Esquire!” he snapped. “Well, what
is it? I haven’t got all day!”
“Well, Mr. Esquire, I wanted to see your”—I paused to read
the sign, not wanting to offend the shopkeeper again
—“motivational motion device.”
“Hmm. I was just going to oil and curl my moustache,” Mr.
Madan Mohan, Esquire, muttered. “What use have you for it
anyway?”
“How can I know what use I have for it if I haven’t even
seen it?”
“Then it’ll be just as well you come back tomorrow. Or
better yet, next week.” The man took out a metal rod and
began to pull down the corrugated shutters in front of the shop.
“Maybe next month, there’s a good girl.”
I was getting irritated. “If you’re not willing to show it,
how do you ever expect to sell it?”
“Sell it?” Mr. Madan Mohan, Esquire, put back up the
shutters with a snap. “For money? Why that’s a splendid
thought! Why didn’t I think of that myself?” The little man
reached over the counter and pumped my hand. “There’s a
reason that you’re in the business that you’re in!”
I snatched back my arm. “I’m not in any business! You’re
the one in business. I just wanted to see what you’re selling—
in case I need it to run away from a rakkhosh!”
“Yes, of course you do! Why didn’t you say so before?”
His moustache quivered.
I rolled my eyes. Someone needed some lessons in basic
capitalism. But before I could turn away, the tiny shopkeeper
came out of the stall with the most amazing contraption.
A wooden frame balanced on Mr. Madan Mohan’s shoulders,
and from the back of this frame rose a long stick extending
beyond the man’s head. From this stick, parallel to the ground,
was what looked like a fishing pole whose end dangled just
beyond the man’s nose.
“What is that?”
“Just see!” He took a bag of potato chips from his pocket,
attached it to the end of the fishing pole, then let the line out a
little farther from a handle he held.
Even though he had just put them there himself, Mr. Madan
Mohan, Esquire, went a little crazy at the sight of the potato
chips. Glassy eyed and drooling, he started chasing the chips
farther and farther down the street, as if not realizing that all
he had to do was reel them in.
“Wait! Wait!” I ran after the little man.
He was so fast, it took me a few seconds to catch up with
even his short legs.
“This is your invention? A fishing pole with a bag of chips
at the end?”
“What do you know about it?” The shopkeeper seemed
ready to keep running, so I grabbed the potato chips from the
pole. This incensed the little man even further.
“Thief! Thief!” he shouted, his face purple.
“Wait a minute! Take the bag!” I thrust it at the man. “I
didn’t steal anything from you! I was just wondering why
anyone would need chips if they were running from a demon. I
mean, wouldn’t that be motivation enough?”
“But they’re vinegar and chili flavored!” he said, as if this
explained it all. Then his face turned purple again and he
continued to shout. “Thief! Thief! You’re part of that band that
stole my moustache last week!”
Mr. Madan Mohan, Esquire, yelled so much that a small
crowd gathered. I tried hard not to laugh.
“This girl has stolen my moustache!” The man pointed a
spindly finger at me.
A portly police constable pushed his way forward of the
group. “Brother Madan, calm yourself. When did this theft
occur?”
“Last week!” the little man shouted. “Yesterday!
Tomorrow!” With each word, his moustache twitched and
danced.
The crowd rumbled, and I felt my amusement congeal into
fear. I heard someone hiss the word “stranger.”
The constable wrote down the shopkeeper’s accusations in
a tiny notebook. In fact, the notebook was so tiny, he had to
keep flipping pages with each and every word he wrote.
“Last”—flip—“week”—flip—“yesterday”—flip
—“tomorrow.” He mouthed the words as he wrote, sounding
them out.
“Wait a minute!” I protested. “No one stole it—your
moustache is right on your face!” But my heart was starting to
gallop. What was the punishment for theft in this place? Jail?
Whipping? Being forced to eat gross snack foods? Something
worse?
“Don’t believe her!” The little man shook his fist. “She’s a
practiced liar! She came to sell me her rakkhosh-slaying
invention!”
“I didn’t!” I protested. “I wanted to see your invention!”
“You see? A liar through and through! First she tells me she
doesn’t like vinegar and chili chips and now that my
moustache is on my face!”
“You don’t like vinegar and chili chips?” The constable
took a step toward me. I put my hands up, and tried to back
away, but the people behind me pushed me forward.
“Look!” a shrill voice piped up from the crowd. It was a
round-eyed boy in too-big clothes, and he pointed at the
shopkeeper. “His moustache is on his face!”
It was like a miracle.
The shopkeeper touched his considerable facial hair. “So it
is! She must have snuck it back when I wasn’t looking!”
The police constable frowned. “Consider this a warning,
young lady! Moustache theft is a serious crime!”
Mr. Madan Mohan, Esquire, was making witchy fingers in
my direction, but I ignored him, and eventually he started back
for his shop. He placed the bag of chips at the end of the
fishing line and once again chased it until he was out of sight.
The crowd that had formed around me began to thin. I took
a deep breath, willing my heart to calm down. That was a
close one.
Someone tugged at my elbow. “You are wanting something
to help you fight a rakkhosh?” It was the boy with the big
eyes. Just like his eyes swam in his face, his slim body swam
in someone else’s enormous shirt and pants. “Come into my
father’s shop, please.”
He led me to a stall filled with weapons of every variety.
There were rows of glittering swords, their handles inlaid with
scrollwork and precious jewels. I picked up one, but it was so
heavy it practically bent my wrist all the way back.
Remembering how hard it was to control Prince Lal’s weapon,
I returned it to the rack.
“What are these?” I pointed to a glass shelf full of bottles
and powders.
“Hot oil for pouring in a demon’s ear,” the boy explained.
“Snuff for making it sneeze. A tack to put on a sitting chair.
Tricky chewing gum to glue its jaws together.”
I didn’t want to ever again get close enough to a rakkhosh
to pour oil in its ear or put a tack on its chair. And how I was
supposed to convince one to chew gum, I wasn’t sure at all.
“What about these?” I ran my hand over a beautiful bow
and a set of arrows of light ash. When I pulled it, the string of
the bow sang a note pure as a bell.
“Sister, you are knowing to use a bow and arrow?”
I nodded. Archery was something they did teach at school.
And despite that unfortunate accident—where I hit Mr. Taylor,
the assistant gym teacher, in the thigh with an arrow—I
actually loved it. Whenever we were given a choice between
sports, I always chose archery. When everyone else was
practicing their spikes, lobs, or dribbling, I’d been practicing
aiming an arrow at a target. (And trying not to injure any more
teachers, no matter how tempting.)
The bow and arrows came with a featherlight quiver I slung
over my shoulder next to my backpack.
“What are these?” My attention was captured by a pair of
cuffs with a swirling snake-shaped design on them. The big
white orb in the snake’s mouth made it look like the serpent
was trying to swallow the moon. I couldn’t take my eyes off
them.
 “Those are for protecting an archer’s arms from the bow.”
The boy glanced at my arm. Was he staring at my scar? “There
is a legend …”
I made a quick gesture I’d perfected from years of being
stared at by curious kids. I turned my right side away from
him, tugging the T-shirt sleeve down.
“I’ll take them all.”
I was just paying for the weapon and cuffs with some more
of Ma’s rupees when a familiar whinny made me turn around.
“Snowy!” I threw my arms around the winged horse’s
neck. He chewed on my shoulder, which I took to mean he
was glad to see me too.
 “Just Kiran, we were so worried!” Lal bowed low. “We are
so delighted you are alive!”
I felt all fizzy soda-pop on the inside. It was good to see
some familiar faces.
“It took you long enough!” Neel muttered. But underneath
his glowering brows, I could see a hint of a smile.
All right, I’d made it past the transit officer, bought a bow
and arrows, and finally found my princely tour guides. Time to
get this rescue on the road!
It is an excellent weapon,” Lal said, handling my new
purchase. “The bow is supple but strong, and these arrows will
fly true.”
Lal’s words made the whole warrior-princess thing super
real. I might be good at aiming at a target during gym, but
would I be able to fight off another real-life demon? If I was
honest with myself, the answer was yes. Growing up, I’d
always had the feeling there was something special out there,
something more, with my name on it. That it would involve
battling rakkhosh, I never would have guessed. But still, it was
like my heart had been caged up this whole time, and now I
had finally set it free to beat as loud and brave as it wanted.
“Those armbands.” Lal touched the snake cuffs on my
forearms. Then I saw his eyes widen as he spotted my scar
peeking out from under my T-shirt. “Princess, the design—”
But Neel cut him off. “There’s one other thing we’ll need
before we go.”
“My parents …” I began.
“We suspect they have been taken to a well of dark energy
—the place from where all rakkhosh originate,” said Lal with
a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“Ma said something about the dark and terrible place where
spells end,” I remembered aloud.
“They should be safe there for a little while,” Lal
continued. “But in the meantime, we must make sure that we
are well prepared with all we need.”
 I didn’t have time to ask more questions, because Neel was
urging us along. He led us toward a dingy little stall all the
way at the end of the market. As we approached it, the horses
fought their harnesses and stomped their feet. Maybe I was
imagining it, but it was as if I could feel the fear coming off
their skin in waves.
“I know how you feel, buddy,” I whispered into Snowy’s
ear. The animal rolled its eyes back and shed a few feathers in
its agitation.
“What is this place?” I asked Lal.
“My brother is determined to make a purchase from
Chhaya,” Lal said as he tried to control an increasingly
aggressive Midnight, “the purveyor of shadows.”
The shelves lining the walls of the little shop were covered
in row after row of bottles. They were large, small, round,
slim, some in deep colors of red and blue and green, others in
clear glass, still others frothing and bubbling under their lids.
An old woman in a tattered sari stood behind the counter,
leaning on a knobby cane.
“Why are you here, my prince?” she hissed. “Surely not for
what I am selling!”
“Chhaya Devi.” Prince Neelkamal joined his hands
together before her in a gesture of respect. He added the word
devi, which means “goddess,” at the end of her name—so that
her name became “the shadow goddess.”
I hung back with Lal, helping him control the skittish
horses. I caressed Snowy’s nose, whispering to him. He
exhaled puffs of hot air on my hand, while opening then
folding his wings, as if he wasn’t sure whether to fly away
without us.
 The old crone peered at Neel with one sharp eye. The
woman’s other eye, rheumy and diseased, focused directly at
me. I could feel her gaze boring into the mark on my arm.
“You have brought this princess back home from exile?”
Neel nodded. “We’re going to face many challenges, and I
think we might need help from both the darkness and the
light.”
My skin broke out in goose bumps. I hardly noticed Snowy
chewing nervously on a strand of my hair.
“That is your mistake, Prince! And that will be your
downfall!” the crone snapped, waving her cane. “You think of
good and bad as something separate? There is no darkness
without light, no light without darkness.” The old woman
coughed—a horrible, hacking sound. When she caught her
breath again, she continued, “Unless you accept that, you will
fail in this quest, my crown prince.”
“You know I’m not—” Neel began, but the crone cut him
off.
“I know no such thing.”
Next to me, Lal took in a shaky breath. His face was pale
and now he looked as frightened as the horses. Even though I
didn’t know what worried him, it was my turn to pat him
reassuringly on the shoulder.
“You must see and accept the face of your shadow self, but
never lose yourself in the darkness,” the old woman was
saying. “If you do that, no one can fetch you back.”
Neel looked a little shaken by the crone’s words. “I won’t
… I’m not … I mean …” He snuck a look in my direction. “I
understand.”
 “You understand nothing! You are like one forever asleep
in your selfish misery!” she spat. “But you will understand
before this quest is over. You will awake and see or perish
trying!” The old woman hobbled over to a tiny purple vial
with a pointed cork. The vial seemed to be full of a pulsating,
swirling energy.
“Take this shadow—it took me weeks to capture the spirit
of the old banyan tree. Its roots are many and deep, its
branches curious and reaching.” She cackled to herself. “But
Chhaya is patient, more patient even than the oldest tree in the
oldest grove. I waited until the banyan’s shadow began to
creep out over the earth. And then I caught it in my bottle!”
Catching the spirits of trees in bottles? Visiting the goddess
of shadows? I shivered. I was definitely not in New Jersey
anymore.
The old woman handed the vial to Neel, who seemed
careful not to touch it. He wrapped it in a cloth pulled out of
his pocket and tucked it away again.
“How much shall I give you?”
“Do not talk to me about money!” the old woman spat.
“You know what I want in return.”
Lal gasped. “No, in the name of our royal father, please
don’t promise it!”
Neel didn’t even acknowledge his brother’s presence. “I
promise,” he said to the crone. But the fist by Neel’s side was
clenching and unclenching.
Then Neel turned on his heel and strode toward us. “Close
your mouths; you don’t want mosquitoes to fly in, do you?” he
snapped, grabbing Midnight’s reigns. “Let’s go.”
We were all quiet. I mounted Snowy, sitting in front of Lal
like I’d done before. Neel gave me a hard stare, but said
nothing. I’d never known it was possible for someone to look
both angry and lonely, but that’s how he looked to me.
The horses seemed more than willing to take off after our
visit to the merchant of shadows. They beat their strong wings
on the wind, as if to put as much distance as possible between
them and the old woman’s shop.
I was feeling impatient now. We’d gotten to the transit
corridor; I’d made my way past the transit officer and
managed to find Neel and Lal in the bazaar. It was time to get
on with my goal: to find my parents in this dark well thingy
and bring them home.
“Where is this place my parents are trapped?” I asked over
my shoulder as soon as we were airborne. “And how do I get
them out?”
“To tell you the truth, um, Princess, I mean, um, Just Kiran,
from the point of view of exact latitude and longitude,
calculating for planetary rotation and, of course, head- and
tailwinds …” Lal hesitated.
I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. Worse than
when I threw up corn dogs at the amusement park. And it
wasn’t the altitude.
“Spit it out,” I shouted over the wind.
“Well, the truth is, we don’t exactly know where your
parents are.”
“What the what?” I snapped around so fast I almost slipped
off Snowy’s back. “You told me they were in that demon
wellspring!”
Lal grabbed my arm and the horse adjusted itself to stop me
from almost plummeting to my doom for the second time in
two days.
 “Yes, erm, but, well, ah.” Lal had the grace to blush.
“That’s probably true. Only, there are a lot of, um, such wells
all over the kingdom and beyond.”
“Are you kidding me?” My mind was racing. The princes
had lied to me—they lied!
“I am terribly regretful … we let you believe we knew
more precisely where they were,” Lal mumbled. “We know
they are somewhere here in the Kingdom Beyond Seven
Oceans and Thirteen Rivers. Or perhaps very near. We’ll …
well, we will just need a bit of help finding the exact location.”
“Is that so? And why should I believe you?”
Neel pulled Midnight next to us. “Come on, stop being
such a—”
I shouted over him, poison daggers in every word, “Don’t
even think about calling me a 2-D!” I was so angry, I could
practically feel the fangs coming out.
“Whoa!” Neel countered. “Look who’s getting her turban
in a bunch.”
“I’m not wearing a turban, or hadn’t you noticed?” I
snapped back.
Neel looked over at my long hair, which was, as usual, in
pinned braids at the back of my neck. “I noticed.”
I felt my cheeks start to burn. I looked away from Neel, but
not before I saw that one evil eyebrow rise. Argh, he was
impossible!
Neel cleared his voice. “Look, we don’t exactly know
where they are, but we’re going somewhere we can find out.”
“Where’s that?”
Lal pointed to the ground below. “Home!”
We were far away from the green valley with its strange
bazaar, and had arrived in a place equally as breathtaking.
There was a forest to our left, with cackling monkeys and
cawing birds. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a herd of
brown-and-white-dappled deer run by. Rising majestically to
our right was the most awesome palace I had ever seen—not
that I’d seen any in real life, but it was more beautiful than any
movie or storybook castle. Its spires were golden, studded with
diamonds, sapphires, and rubies. Its walls were silver and
bronze, with carved decorations in them. Each carved panel on
the palace walls seemed to tell its own story. Scenes showed a
festival, a wedding, and … yup. Two turbaned princes setting
off on a journey mounted on their winged horses.
“We’ve got to find Minister Tuni. He’ll probably have
some useful ideas about where we should start looking for Just
Kiran’s parents.” Lal’s words melted me a little. Even though
he’d lied, he was obviously still willing to help me find my
family.
“Let’s, ah, get the horses settled first.” This suggestion of
Neel’s was made with a funny, teasing tone.
“If you insist, Brother.” I was curious to see Lal squirming
a little.
I wasn’t sure what that was about, but Snowy and Midnight
seemed to like the idea. As soon as we dismounted, they
trotted off in the direction of what must have been the palace
stables. The stables were like twenty times nicer than my
house—even before it got totaled by a demon with a sinus
infection. The walls were made of bronze, with pillars of
marble, and images of flying horses were carved into the outer
walls.
“Hurry, Princess! I wanna show you my favorite place in
all our kingdom!” Lal dashed off, forgetting at last to act like a
fancy prince.
Even though I was still annoyed at him, I couldn’t help
smiling. Unlike his brother, it was so easy to see what Lal was
feeling. And right now, the handsome prince was happy to be
home.
“Come on, he wants you to meet Mati.” Neel frowned at
me as he said this, as if irritated that I was still there. At that,
all my fear and worry transformed back into anger.
“So do you ever smile?”
Neel raised that eyebrow again. “Only when I have
something to smile about.”
He really should change his name to Mr. Smirky Cool Guy,
I thought. If Lal was always trying to be princely and proper,
at least he was actually nice underneath that fake accent. Neel,
on the other hand, kept trying to make himself unlikeable. And
boy, was he doing a good job of it.
“You really think highly of yourself, huh?”
“You’re really nosy all the time, huh?” Neel countered.
“I wouldn’t call wanting to know the truth about where
we’re going or where my parents are being nosy.” I felt my
face heating up and my voice rising. “You’re the ones who lied
to me.”
“Well, I’m so sorry this rescue isn’t going exactly
according to your schedule, Princess. Would you rather we just
didn’t help you and let you get on your way alone?”
 “You know that’s not what I meant!” I snapped. “But you
could have told me the truth back in New Jersey!”
“Would you have come with us if we told you we didn’t
know exactly where your parents were?”
I had nothing to say to that. We’d left Parsippany in such a
rush, escaping from that rakkhosh. But if I’d really had time to
think it through, would I have gone off with two princes I
didn’t know, who didn’t even know how to find my parents?
Probably not. And where would that have left me? Alone and
no closer to rescuing Ma and Baba.
We walked in a tense silence behind Lal to the palace
stables. The big double doors had been hastily shut after the
horses had trotted in. A little light shone from in between.
“May I come in?” Lal called through the half-open door.
“No, you may not,” answered a musical voice from inside.
A girl’s voice.
I glanced at Neel, who muttered, “It’s the custom here,”
without meeting my eyes. “You never—never—say you invite
someone through a door.”
Before I could ask any more, the ornately carved doors of
the stables flung open.
“My princes, you are home!”
Standing before us was a sturdy, capable-looking girl with
shoulder-length dark hair. She was dressed like the boys, in
loose pants and a flowing top. She had on knee-high boots and
held a broom in her hand.
“Princess Just Kiran, I am honored to introduce you to my
very best friend.” Lal grinned ear to ear. “Except my brother,
of course! This is Mati!”
 Mati joined her hands. “Namaskar, Princess Just Kiran,
welcome to our kingdom.”
“Um … hi.” I awkwardly namaskar-ed her back. Even with
all the stuff I’d discovered about myself in the last day—that I
could fight demons, that I really was a princess—I still didn’t
like meeting new people that much. I could never think of
what to say. Except with Neel, of course, but His Royal Pain-
in-the-Heinie was obviously an exception to the rule.
I stepped through the stable doorway and took in the
surroundings. The place was sparkling, and smelled like … the
closest thing I could think of was the smell of freshly washed
cotton—like when Baba pulled me out a shirt straight from the
dryer. And what was that other smell? Was it honey?
“This is nectar from the bees in our forest.” Mati pulled out
a silver pitcher and poured a rich golden liquid into Midnight
and Snowy’s troughs. “It’s the best food for a pakkhiraj
horse.”
“A pakkhiraj?” I repeated.
“The name for this type of flying horse.” As Mati moved
from trough to trough, I noticed that she dragged one of her
feet a little. It was barely noticeable, but one of her shoes had a
thicker sole than the other, making up for the shorter leg.
“Didn’t Their Royal Highnesses tell you?”
“Cool it with the royal highness stuff, Mati,” Neel ordered.
He had taken off his jeweled turban and collar, and his dark
hair was sticking up on end. “We’ve known you for way too
long to take that kind of beetlejuice from you.”
“Mati is the daughter of our stable master,” Lal explained.
“A wise teacher who taught all three of us to ride, to use
weapons, to care for animals, and many more things.”
 “She’s like our little sister. She’s a lot tougher than she
looks.” As he passed by her, Neel playfully messed up Mati’s
hair, to which the seemingly mild-mannered Mati threw the
nectar pitcher at his retreating head. It hit Neel’s shoulder and
bounced harmlessly to the stable floor.
“Nice! Your throwing arm’s improving!” Neel examined a
big blob of nectar on his shirt, and took a taste. “Maybe you’ll
make it as a bowler in the royal cricket league after all!”
“All credit goes to you for giving me so much reason to
practice my aim, Your Royalness!” Mati stuck out her tongue,
then lobbed a horse brush at him, which Neel caught with a
laugh and a bow.
This was a different side of Neel than I’d seen before. With
me, he just seemed irritating and self-centered and maybe even
a little dangerous, but with Mati he seemed almost like a nice
person. Almost.
As I thought this, I looked over at Lal, and noticed that he
wasn’t joining in his brother and Mati’s teasing. He made big
eyes and gaped a little at Mati, then caught himself and studied
a nail in the floor, a beam on the ceiling, and, finally, a little
thread on his sleeve. In fact, he made such a big show of
looking everywhere but at Mati, it was totally obvious that was
the only person he wanted to look at. If the girl noticed, she
didn’t say anything, but kept throwing random stuff at Neel.
Suddenly, the reason for Neel’s earlier teasing of his brother
became clear. Had we all been at school, I would have passed
a note to Zuzu in class with the word *AWKWARD* written in
big curly letters.
“Unlike some people, I still have work to do.” Mati shook
her finger playfully at Neel, and moved over to the white
horse.
 “Excuses, excuses.” Neel tossed the horse brush back at
her. “You’ll never fulfill your potential as a cricket star with
that attitude.”
I felt a pang of jealousy at how comfortable Mati was with
the princes, how much she fit with them. They were all so
relaxed in one another’s presence—there was no arguing, no
lying, no calling one another 2-Ds or anything else. Instead,
everyone seemed to just be so happy and, oh, I don’t know, at
home with each other.
As Mati worked, she radiated such a sense of purpose and
competence that I could almost feel it. Snowy nuzzled her
cheek, leaving a nectary trail on her neck. “There you go, my
handsome one, my Tushar Kona, my star,” the girl murmured.
“What did you call him?” I asked, feeling a little shy.
Mati looked up at me with steady caramel eyes. “Tushar
Kona—snowflake.”
“You didn’t realize that was his name, my lady?” Lal asked.
“I thought you must have heard that from us—and perhaps
that was why you were calling him Snowy.”
The white horse whinnied and I could have sworn he was
grinning at me.
“No, I didn’t know,” I admitted. “But maybe Snowy told
me himself.”
I would never have thought such a thing possible back in
New Jersey, but stranger things had happened to me since
leaving home than in my entire life.
“He likes you,” Mati said. I believed her. Mati knew a lot
more than I did, it seemed. About a lot of things. I peeked at
her from under my eyelashes, watching her clean bejeweled
tack and brush glossy coats. Now she was laughing at
something Lal said, shaking her head. What made her so
comfortable with herself? Did she ever wonder how people
saw her, what they thought of her? Did little kids laugh or
point or whisper about her on the street like they did
sometimes with me and my scars? Somehow, I got the feeling
that she didn’t care, even if they did.
Mati was over by Midnight now, and she took the comb
with which Neel was attempting to untangle the horse’s mane.
“Here, give me that, Your Highness; Raat doesn’t like it when
you pull.”
“Whatever you say, boss lady!” Neel said as Mati gave him
a shove.
My skin got all hot and prickly. I felt completely alone.
These three were each other’s family, and I was a total
outsider. I bet they wished they hadn’t brought me along. I bet
they wished I wasn’t even here.
“And I suppose Raat was the one who told you his name
meant night?” Lal asked.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. I felt a sudden and
overwhelming urge to get out of the cozy stables, to do
something—anything—productive toward finding my family.
“Should I go look for this minister guy?” I asked, moving
toward the stable doors. “Maybe you could just tell me where
he is …”
“No, you won’t be able to handle him alone. He’s a bit of a
birdbrain.” Prince Neel fell into step with me and beckoned to
his brother. “Come on, Bro.”
Lal looked sheepish. “Um, you two go ahead, I’ll catch
up.”
Neel stopped and turned around so abruptly I almost
bumped into him. “I am not leaving you alone here.”
 “Wait.” I was so surprised I actually snort-laughed. “Aren’t
you the same guy that wouldn’t save his brother from the
rakkhosh on my front lawn until it was almost too late?”
“That was different.” Neel didn’t even have the courtesy to
look at me as he said this.
I didn’t necessarily want to be alone with Neel, but I also
didn’t want to rob Lal of his precious time with his friend.
Plus, it was fun to annoy the bossy older prince.
“So here’s the thing—Lal’s a big boy. I’m pretty sure he
and Mati will be okay.”
“You don’t understand—” Neel began, but Lal cut him off.
“Just Kiran is right, Brother, I am not a child any longer. I
will be fine here in the stables.”
“Lal, you know we should stay together …”
“Neel, stop worrying! We’ll stay inside the stables and we
won’t invite anyone in,” Mati said in a calm voice. “You said
it yourself, I’m tougher than I look.”
Neel seemed about to argue, but he looked from his
brother’s face to Mati’s and then just nodded. “Come on,
Princess.”
I shrugged and followed him. Boys were so weird.
I walked with Neel out of the stable, wondering what I would
say to the king’s minister. He was probably some important,
busy guy with a lot of government stuff to do. How was I
going to get him to help me?
I turned to Neel, to ask him what the minister was like, but
the expression on his face made the words dry up in my
mouth.
“They’re totally BFFs, you know. Best friends since they
were babies.”
“Huh?” I asked in my not-so-eloquent way.
“My brother and Mati.” Neel gestured over his shoulder to
the still open doorway of the stable. As Mati came to close it, I
could hear the prince chattering away to the stable hand,
telling the girl all about his adventures in the far-off and exotic
land of New Jersey.
“They have these things called Giant Gulpies and machines
that serve fizzy drinks—with free refills all day!” Lal’s voice
became more muffled as the heavy doors closed off the cozy
scene.
“Mati seems nice. She reminds me of my best friend from
home.”
“They can’t spend as much time together anymore.” Neel
picked up a stick from the ground and cracked it angrily in
two. “Not since … well, since our father gave Lal so many
more responsibilities.”
Not knowing what else to say, I just mumbled, “Oh?”
 We were walking away from the stables on a pebble path
through a manicured lawn. On either side of us were fragrant
fruit trees and flowers. I could smell orange blossoms,
hibiscus, some heady jasmine, and a dozen other perfumey
scents I couldn’t identify.
Neel kept talking, as if to himself. “Of course, in my
father’s eyes, a stable master’s daughter isn’t anywhere good
enough to hang out with the precious crown prince.”
That caught my attention. “Wait, didn’t Chhaya Devi say
you were the crown prince? Anyway, isn’t Lal younger than
you?”
“Yeah, well, that’s a long, complicated story.” Neel kicked
at the ground, sending pebbles flying. “But it’s totally for the
best. There’s no way I would want to be crown prince
anyway.”
Curiouser and curiouser. Did Neel really not want to be
crown prince or did their father just not want his oldest son to
inherit the throne? Why would that be? Had Neel done
something really bad—or did their dad think he was just too
arrogant to rule the kingdom?
“My poor brother. He can’t stand disappointing our father,
but he can’t stand disappointing Mati either. He doesn’t get
that you can’t please everyone all the time.”
“I don’t think it’s such a bad thing to be a nice guy.”
“That attitude’s going to get him hurt some day,” Neel
snapped.
I tried a different tack. “Is your dad strict like that with you
too?”
“You could say that.” Neel laughed—a harsh, unhappy
sound. “You could also say that as far as our father’s
concerned, I’m invisible.”
 “Oh, come on,” I scoffed. “Not really?”
“Yeah, really. I might as well be a ghost.” Neel pointed at a
nearby coconut tree. “Like the one who lives in that tree
trunk.”
“Please, you’re trying to tell me there’s really a ghost that
lives in that tree?”
“Usually. Unless she’s out trying to impersonate a human
woman and sneak into a real family again. Don’t ghosts live in
coconut trees in your dimension?”
“No!” I still wasn’t sure whether to believe him, but
quickened my pace just in case, to put more distance between
myself and the tall brown trunk. “Are you just trying to scare
me?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, just lay off. I don’t scare easily.”
Neel snorted. “Good, ’cause I don’t roll with scaredy-cats.”
“Whatever. Could we go meet this minister guy now?”
Neel didn’t say anything else, but loped off, leaving me to
dash after him. To my surprise, he didn’t head toward the
palace, but toward the edge of the forest. I hurried to follow,
and almost crashed right into him when he stopped. He stood
under a guava tree whose branches were heavy with fruit.
“Tuni!” he called. “Oh, Tuni Bhai! Come on, Brother Tuni,
show yourself!”
There was a twittering and a chirping from above our
heads, and then something hard and fast pelted down at us.
“Ow.” I rubbed my head. Something solid had hit me.
Something solid that hurt!
Thunk. Neel rubbed his head too. “Stop it, Tuntuni!”
 An adorable yellow bird with a bright red beak danced on
the branch above our heads.
“Yeaaaaah, boy! I got you good!” The bird chewed on a
piece of bamboo that bobbed up and down in his beak like a
cartoon cigar.

“Come on, Tuni, chill out,” Neel protested. “This is the

princess—”
“From the other dimension!” the bird chirped. “You don’t
gotta tell me! I can smell the ordinariness on her from a
kilometer away! Pee-yew!”
“Please don’t tell me this rude bird is your father’s
minister.” At this, the bird tossed a few more unripe guavas,
which we managed to duck.
“Don’t take the act too seriously,” Neel muttered. “He likes
to keep everybody thinking he’s a few crackers short of a
packet.”
“Tuni doesn’t want a cracker!” the bird rhymed, spitting
seeds. “Especially from a royal slacker!”
 “Tuni, sir … um, do you know where my parents are?” I
asked as politely as I could.
“And why should I tell an unimaginative 2-D like you?”
“Come on, Tuni, strike us a deal—how can we convince
you to tell us what we want?” Neel wheedled.
The bird considered the offer. “Okay, slacker, why don’t
you convince your royal father to arrest the barber?”
“I don’t think the cuckoo thing is an act,” I whispered.
“Nah, he’s just a big poser,” Neel said. Then louder, “Why
should I do that?”
“When I had a thorn in my foot last week, that dratted
barber wouldn’t come—he made me wait and wait. Said he
had human customers who came first.” The bird spit more
guava seeds. “The nerve!”
“I don’t think my father would arrest the barber for that,”
Neel said.
“Well then, how about I ask the palace mouse to bite his
royal potbelly?” Tuni suggested.
“Why would the mouse do that?”
“Well, what if I asked the castle cat to chase the mouse?”
This was getting silly. “Where are my parents?” I
interrupted.
But Neel shushed me with a gesture. “And if the cat
refused to chase the mouse?”
“Why then”—Tuni was gaining steam—“I’d ask the stick
to beat the cat.”
“And if the stick refused to beat the cat?”
“Why then, I’d ask the fire to burn the stick.”
 Neel was apparently enjoying the game. He picked up one
of the hard guavas that the bird had thrown and began to toss it
in the air. But I wondered if he was playacting too, because
there was a muscle twitching suspiciously in the prince’s
cheek.
“And if the fire refused to burn the stick?” Neel asked the
bird.
“Why then, I’d ask the sea to drown the fire!”
I was getting the hang of it. “Okay, so if the sea refused to
put out the fire?” I asked. Neel gave me a glimmer of a grin,
and I was startled by how nice it felt to be on the same team
for once.
“Well then, I would ask the elephant to drink up the sea!”
“And if the elephant refused to drink the sea?” Neel and I
asked in one voice.
“Why then, I would go to the smallest animal I could find.”
“An ant?” I guessed.
“A gnat?” Neel supplied.
Suddenly, I felt a sharp bite on my arm. As I slapped the
sting, something Neel had said in the market came to me.
“No, it’s the mosquito, right?”
Tuni pecked at a guava. “Oh yes, I would ask the mosquito
to bite the elephant.”
“And if the mosquito refused—” Neel began to say, but
now it was my turn to shush him. A light bulb went off in my
head. Weren’t all of Baba’s animal stories about creatures
fulfilling their destiny—their dharma? The moral always
seemed to be that if you ever came across a tiger or a crocodile
in the woods, you weren’t supposed to trust it. Because no
matter how much they promised they weren’t going to eat you,
they definitely would, because that was their nature. To eat
people. Like a mosquito’s was to bite people. I’d never
thought there was much use for Baba’s animal stories—I
mean, it’s not like I was bumping into tigers and crocodiles on
a weekly basis in the Willowbrook Mall. But boy, was I glad
for them now.
I called to Tuni, “The mosquito wouldn’t refuse because
that’s what mosquitoes like to do—that’s their nature—they
bite, right?”
“Yessiree! The Princess Kiranmala will be performing
nightly at seven and eleven in the royal forest tea salon!” the
bird burbled into the stick, as if it were a microphone. “Catch
the best puzzle-solving act this side of the transit corridor!
And be sure not to miss our early-bird shrimp cutlets special!”
“So the mosquito—” I began, but Tuni interrupted me.
“Did you see what I did there?” He put his wing up to his
mouth as if telling me a secret. “With the early-bird special?
Early bird, get it?”
“Hilarious, I get it,” I agreed. “The early bird catches the
worm, the whole thing.”
Tuntuni screeched in glee. “Early bird catches the worm!
Good one! Going to have to remember that!”
Trying not to roll my eyes, I rushed on to solve the rest of
Tuni’s riddle.
“So the mosquito would threaten to bite the elephant, and
then the elephant would threaten to drink the sea, the sea
would threaten to douse the fire, the fire threaten to burn the
stick, the stick threaten to beat the cat …” I stopped to take a
breath.
“The cat threaten to catch the mouse, the mouse threaten to
bite the belly,” Neel supplied.
 “And the king would then agree, after all, to arrest the
barber,” we concluded together.
“Which proves what, boys and girls?” Tuni twirled the
stick of bamboo in his mouth like a baton.
“That cooperation is a good thing?” I guessed.
“That kings should invest in mousetraps?” said Neel wildly.
Tuntuni collapsed with a wing over his eyes. “Oh, the
tragedy of stupidity. And I had such high hopes for you two.”
I looked at the tiny bird, who had our fates in the palm of
his yellow feathery hand. Er, wing. That’s when it struck me.
“That the smallest creature can be the mightiest?”
Tuni sat bolt upright. “Is that your final answer?”
“Uh …” I glanced at Neel, who nodded. “Yes, yes, it’s my
final answer.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to dial a prince?”
“No, she doesn’t want to dial a prince,” snapped Neel.
“I’m sorry, I’ll need to hear it directly from the contestant,”
Tuni said in a fake game-show-announcer voice.
“No, I don’t want to dial a prince.”
“You’re absolutely sure you want to lock it in?” the bird
boomed into the bamboo stick/microphone. “This is for the
whole kit and caboodle, you know.”
“Yes, yes, I want to lock it in!”
“Oh, just get on with it!” Neel sniped.
“Well then …” The bird paused to flap around in a wobbly
circle. “You are right!”
Absurdly, even though we hadn’t actually won anything,
Neel high-fived me and I jumped up and down, whooping.
 “Okay, we’ve solved your riddle,” Neel said. “Now will
you tell us how to find Kiran’s parents?”
The bird considered us, cocking his head this way and that.
His bright eyes twinkled.
“If you can tell me why hummingbirds hum!”
“Oh, come on, Tuni …” Neel began, but I waved him quiet.
“Because they don’t know the words!”
Neel gave me an impressed, raised-eyebrow look and I
shrugged. “What can I say, I’m a girl of many talents.”
Next time I saw him, I’d have to thank Niko for having
such an endless collection of idiotic jokes.
“Enough of this. Just tell us where her parents are!” the
prince demanded.
The bird looked offended, and so I quickly said, “Okay,
how about I tell you a good one?”
“Egg-cellent!” the minister twittered. “Eggs-hilarating!
Eggs-traordinary!”
I barely refrained from groaning and asked, “What kind of
math do snowy owls like?”
“The prince has a brother that’s an owl, you know,” the bird
chirped.
Neel rolled his eyes. “We don’t have all day. If you don’t
know the answer, just say so!”
After a few minutes of twirling his stick-slash-cigar and
mumbling “what kind of math,” “snowy owls like,” the bird
gave up, and I supplied, “Owlgebra!”
Tuntuni and Neel looked at each other, perplexed. “I don’t
get it,” Neel said flatly.
 “Like algebra? Snowy owls like owl-gebra?”
“Must be a 2-D thing.” Tuntuni shook his head
sympathetically.
Neel gave a patronizing thumbs-up. “Good try, though.”
I practically growled. “How can you guys not know what
algebra is?”
“That’s okay, Princess. Not everyone can have a good sense
of humor like me.” The bird tilted his little head. “But maybe
you should stop wasting so much time. Your parents are
missing, you know.”
“You don’t say?” My hands itched to strangle the bird.
“You think you could tell us where they are?”
“Remember, I’m just the oracle for truth. I can’t help you
interpret it,” the bird said rather mysteriously before he cleared
his throat, puffed out his yellow chest, and began:
“Neelkamal and Kiranmala, heed my warning well
Your families will crumble, your life an empty shell
Unless you find the jewel in evil’s hidden room
Cross ruby seas full of love beneath the dark red moon
In a monster’s arms be cradled and cross the desert wide
In the Mountains of Illusions find a wise man by your
side
On a diamond branch, a golden bird must sing a blessed
song
Follow brother red and sister white, but not a moment
too long
In your heart’s fountain, set the pearly waters free
Let golden branch grow from the silver tree
 Only then will you ever find beauty that is true
The magic bird’s every song will shower bliss on you.”
“But …” Neel asked. “What does all that mean—the family
crumbling? The ruby sea?”
“I already told you. I’m just the vessel. Any interpretation
is far beyond my pay grade.”
“But you must be able to tell us something? Where to start
looking for my family?” I begged.
Tuntuni relented, puffing out his chest again. “In the East
of North of East, the Maya Pahar climbs. Stars are born in its
clouds beyond the reach of time. Outside our understanding,
the Maya Mountains hide. Bravery and wisdom can be your
only guide.”
Then, as abruptly as he had spoken, the bird rudely
belched, flapped his wings, and started to fly off the branch.
“Wait a minute!” I called. “The East of North of East—
where’s that? How can I find these Maya Mountains?”
“What, d’ya want me to draw you a map?” the bird
snapped, spitting a few more seeds before it flew away. “This
ain’t Joisey, Princess, fuggedaboutit.”
Just what I needed, a bird with a bad attitude!
“Now what?” I asked Neel.
“Well, first things first, we write down the poem.” He
pulled a half-ripped piece of paper out of his pocket. “After
you’ve been around the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and
Thirteen Rivers awhile, you realize almost everything around
here—even silly poems—have hidden meanings.”
“Why can’t he tell us what all that stuff means?” I
complained. “That seems totally unfair. I mean, we solved his
riddle. And the dumb joke.”
“I don’t get it either, but those poems just come to him—he
doesn’t know what they mean any more than we do,” Neel
said as he scribbled on the paper with a stubby pencil. “People
used to get so mad at him about it. That’s why he developed
that nasty personality to fend them off.”
“Is that why you do it too? Have a nasty personality, I
mean.” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop
them. I realized how mean they must sound, so to backpedal, I
laughed in a super-awkward, high-pitched way, then
immediately wanted to bash myself in the head. Real smooth,
Kiran. Real smooth.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” Neel said as he folded and put the
paper away. “Come on, let’s go and see what my father has to
say about Tuntuni’s poem.”
Still embarassed by my own words, I glanced down at
myself and wondered what he saw. “Um, shouldn’t I wash up
and change before I present myself to a … king?”
“You’re fine,” Neel said without even looking at me. But
he was wearing silks and jewels, and I was in dirty jeans, a
smudged T-shirt, and muddy combat boots. I realized I hadn’t
even bathed since being covered in rakkhosh snot on my front
lawn. For the first time in my life, I wished I wasn’t always so
worried about fading into the background.
“Seriously, Neel?” I put my hands on my hips and stopped
walking. “Seriously?” There was a chunk of hair loose from
my braid and it drifted right in front of my eyes. I blew it away
with a gust of breath, but it settled back on my face.
He studied me, considering. “My father won’t care what
you look like. Now, my stepmothers, that’s another story.”
“Your stepmothers?”
“Yeah. Lal’s mom, and the other queens, they’re kind of
sticklers for how people dress and junk like that.”
“Wait a minute.” TMI—this was definitely a case of too
much information all at once. I remembered that in a lot of
Baba’s stories, the kings had more than one queen. (“Once,
long ago, there was a king with three queens—Big Rani,
Middle Rani, and Little Rani.”) But it was one thing to think
about stuff like that happening a long, long time ago, and
something else entirely to think about a boy you knew having
a family so totally different from your own.
“Your father has a lot of wives? And you guys are half
brothers?”
“Is that a problem for you?” Neel crossed his arms over his
chest.
I bit the inside of my cheek. “No, not at all.” I definitely
wasn’t in New Jersey anymore.
 “Good.”
We walked in silence for a bit longer. I kept sneaking looks
up to Neel’s face to see if he was angry, but he was staring
straight ahead. Although his expression was more thoughtful
and sad than anything else.
“Um, Neel?” I said after a few minutes.
“Yeah?”
“So do you think I could, like, clean up a little before I
meet your dad and stepmoms?”
“Oh, right.” Neel raised that eyebrow. “You do look kind of
a mess.”
“Nice. Thanks a lot.”
We entered a courtyard of the palace, with lots of doorways
leading off of it. A few people—who must have been palace
servants—scurried here and there with brooms and dust cloths
and piles of clean and dirty laundry. Neel called over a young
woman who was carrying bed linens over an arm.
“Hello, Danavi!”
The woman smiled and nodded. “Welcome home, Your
Highness.”
“This is the Princess Kiranmala.” Neel gestured to me.
“Will you please help her get cleaned up and changed?”
The woman bowed in my direction. I gave her a goofy half
curtsy in return. She looked at me like I was as kooky as
Tuntuni.
“Is my father in the audience chamber?” Neel asked.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“Please bring the princess there when she is ready.” Neel
was scowling again. “I have a lot I want to discuss with the
Raja.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
I watched his departing back, wondering at my own hurt.
He hadn’t even said good-bye. Then, just as quickly, my
feelings turned to annoyance. Neel was so predictably
irritating.
Danavi gave me a curious glance. She didn’t even try to
hide the fact that she was studying the scar on my arm.
Clearly, people here were a lot less worried about being caught
staring.
My reaction, though, kind of startled even me. Rather than
trying to hide the scar, I just stared back at her. It felt good not
to hide.
Finally Danavi spoke. “So you are the princess who has
been living in exile?”
“I guess so. I didn’t even believe I really was a princess
until yesterday.”
The woman nodded. “Yes, this is the way it is, I have
heard, for those living in the two-dimensional realm. It is safer
that way.”
With all the excitement, I hadn’t had time to ask about the
details of my “exile.” Everyone kept talking about it.
“What do you know about why I was sent away?” I asked
as the woman led me to a beautifully decorated bedroom off
the courtyard. The walls of the room were covered with
creeping vines, and blossoms drooped fragrantly from the
ceiling. It was like a magical indoor garden. I got a little dizzy
from the heavy smell of the flowers, like I had in the
marketplace.
 “I don’t know very much, only what people say.” Danavi
filled up a claw-foot tub in the middle of the room. She tossed
in some rose petals and something that made pink foam in the
water.
“Tell me what you know,” I begged. I didn’t even care that
the water was pink, my least favorite color. As long as it was
warm.
“Are you sure, my lady?” She put a folding screen around
the tub, and waited on the other side as I took off my clothes
and hopped into the sudsy water.
“Please.”
I sank into the tub and blew some pink bubbles from my
hands. It was heavenly.
“Well.” The woman’s disembodied voice came floating
from the other side of the screen. “Long ago, when the moon
maiden was once wandering the earth in human form, she fell
in love with the handsome king of the underworld, and he with
her. He convinced her to follow him below the surface of the
water to his serpent kingdom, and marry him. And his love
was so powerful, that she did this. But first, she made him
swear to one condition. And her condition was that she be
made to visit her husband’s dark land only one night of every
month. And on this night there is no moon in the sky.”
“The night of the new moon,” I murmured, stretching my
aching limbs in the water. I wasn’t bothered that the woman
wasn’t getting right to my life story. I was used to Baba’s tales,
which always started off in a meandering way too.
“Now, the moon maiden was wise to strike such a bargain,
but none of us can be as wise as we think we are.”
“Mmm,” I answered, barely listening. I worked at
scrubbing the nasty out of my hair. Some leaves, twigs, and …
was that a rakkhosh tooth? *shudder*
On the other side of the screen, the story continued.
“Unfortunately, the maiden forgot to include a clause in her
agreement about her children.”
I poured water over my head with a silver cup. The moon
was casting a shimmery glow across the floor in front of the
tub. Then there was a muffled bumping on the other side of the
screen. I prompted, “Danavi?”
For a minute, the shadows in the room shifted.
Then the woman coughed, cleared her throat, and
continued in a raspier voice. “The moon maiden grieved as her
first seven children were turned into snakes by the underworld
king—doomed to live forever in his dark kingdom under the
earth.”
“That’s horrible!”
“Yes, my princess,” she agreed. “And so, when the moon
maiden’s eighth child, a girl, took her first breath, she decided
that she would save her daughter from the fate of her seven
brothers. She put the baby in a clay pot and floated her down
the River of Dreams.”
I sputtered, wiping wet strands of hair off my face. Wait a
minute, this part of the story sounded familiar.
“Who found the baby?” My skin broke out in goose bumps.
The water felt suddenly cold.
“A kind farmer and his wife.”
With trembling hands, I touched the crescent-shaped mark
on my neck. A curved moon. “And then?”
“And then, my princess,” the woman went on, “what you
might imagine happened. The Serpent King decided to claim
his daughter—to add another powerful snake to his court.”
 I jumped out of the bath, grabbed a towel Danavi had left
for me, and started drying off. My head was spinning. “And
then?”
“Well, there was a terrible struggle. The baby was marked
on the arm as the Serpent King tried to capture her.”
I stopped drying. Marked on the arm? Oh no, could it be?
The woman continued, “The moon maiden did all that was
in her power—she exiled the farmers and the child out of the
Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers to a
smoggy place at the end of a dark tunnel, a place where wide
tarred roads stretch on and on, and no one can ever take a left
turn …”
“A place called New Jersey?” The pieces were all fitting
together.
“Why yes,” the woman agreed. “But the moon magic was
only so powerful. The exile would last a mere dozen years,
and on the child’s twelfth birthday, the spell would begin to
implode, forcing the two farmers back to this land of
enchantment.”
Water dripped off me onto the floor. I couldn’t seem to stop
my teeth from chattering. How could I have not known? Neel
had said something about the people I thought were my
parents, and back then I hadn’t believed him. But some deep
instinct told me the woman’s tale was true. That my parents
weren’t my parents. That my biological father was a serpent
king, and my mother a moon maiden. It felt like a nightmare—
like I’d just stepped into one of Baba’s stories. Yet, unlike
those, I’d never heard this story before and had no idea how it
was supposed to end.
“Are you ready, my princess? May I come in?” the woman
asked.
 I wrapped the towel around myself. My eyes were hot. I
will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.
“One sec,” I mumbled.
Ma and Baba—they probably hated me. I was some kind of
royal burden to them, a baby they’d saved and then been
saddled with because of a dumb enchantment. I thought about
Baba’s fear of snakes, his efforts to make sure one never got
into our house. He was trying to protect me. And Ma’s thing
about having no curtains—she was trying to make sure the
moon could shine on me.
No wonder they’d insisted I be a princess every Halloween.
They were trying to tell me. I just wasn’t willing to listen. My
whole face stung. I will not cry. I will not cry.
“Your Highness?”
All I could think about was what kind of brat I’d been. And
how much Ma and Baba had given up for me. Their whole
world. Their yard. Curtains. They probably were glad to be rid
of me. My throat felt woolly. I could barely breathe. I will not
cry.
“May I come in?”
I was all alone. With no idea of who I really was. Who was
I? Who was Princess Kiranmala? I couldn’t begin to imagine.
“Do you invite me to enter?”
“Yeah,” I managed to get out. “I invite you to enter.”
In a flash, Danavi was around the screen. Maybe I hadn’t
paid so much attention before, but there was something
different about her. I was so distracted thinking about my
parents, though, that I couldn’t put my finger on it. Instead I
stayed lost in thought as the woman helped me into a delicate
silk tunic and loose pants embroidered with a lotus pattern. I
didn’t even notice it wasn’t black. Or that the scar on my arm
was totally visible from under its tiny sleeves. I sat numbly in
front of the mirror, my head full of moonbeams and serpents’
tails.
“You are like a lotus, my princess.” The woman combed
my hair, braiding it and twisting it into an elaborate style.
“You are a flower that has thrived even in the most dark and
polluted waters.”
“What?” I jerked away as Danavi yanked a little too hard.
“Well,” she explained in a wheedling voice, “you are a
beautiful blossom, despite being raised by simpletons who toil
in the dirt.” She pinned my hair up, away from my neck. I felt
her fingers graze my hairline.
“Those are my parents you’re talking about,” I snapped,
even as I felt a familiar embarrassment creep up on me. It was
the same feeling I got when Jovi sneered at me for having
parents who owned a Quickie Mart.
“They are farmers, my princess, no kind of parents for one
of royal blood. No kind of parents for one with both the moon-
mark”—she touched my neck again—“and snake sign.” She
touched my arm now, smiling toothily in the mirror.
The snake sign? Those U-shaped eyeglasses. Why hadn’t I
realized it before? Or had I just not let myself? The scar on my
arm was the same as the markings on a cobra’s head.
“They are no parents for the likes of you, my princess,”
Danavi cackled.
I whipped around to face her, my temper burning. “You
have no idea what you’re talking about!”
I felt something strong harden inside of me. Something I
couldn’t hide from. The truth. Had Ma and Baba ever treated
me differently? Like I wasn’t their own? Granted, they were
seriously kooky. Ma was always stuffing me full of food. Baba
was always stuffing me full of stories. But they didn’t hate me;
they adored me. And all I could think about was how much I
wanted to be with them again.
I waved off the slippers the woman offered me and jammed
my still damp feet into my trusty boots. My eyes were hot, but
my voice was firm.
“My parents saved my life,” I said, “and raised me. They
may not be perfect, but they didn’t ask to get dragged into this
mess. Only now they have been, and I’m going to get them out
of it.”
“Oh, a thousand pardons. Of course you are, my princess.
You and your companions are very brave. You will go now
and rouse the good princes Lalkamal and Neelkamal from the
palace …”
“No, just Neel’s in the palace,” I corrected before I could
stop myself. “Lal’s in the stables with Mati.”
“In the stables?” The woman’s eyes shone strangely in the
mirror. “Without his brother’s protection? Well, well, isn’t that
convenient …”
Wait a minute. A terrible feeling came over me.
I stood up and started to back away. “Who are you?”
Something was seriously not right here. Too late, I
remembered how Mati answered when Lal asked if he could
come into the stables. She said no. What had Neel said? That it
was a custom in their country? That you never granted
someone permission to enter?
“I’m Danavi—don’t you know what my name means?” The
maid threw off her cloak, revealing an entirely different form.
A beautiful, dark-haired woman with a bejeweled crown stood
before me. All the hairs on my neck stood at some serious
attention.
“What?” I squeaked.
The woman smiled, revealing two fangs that hung below
her ruby lips. “Demoness!” she said. “But you can call me
Demon Queen!”
Aw, bilious rakkhosh snot. Here we went again.
I tried to run, but the rakkhoshi ripped a handful of her own
hair from her head and threw it at me. It might as well have
been a handful of quick-drying cement. As soon as the magical
hair hit me, I couldn’t move at all. I realized with dread that
the demoness’s smile reminded me of someone I knew.
“Rakkhoshi! Be gone!” a voice commanded from the
doorway. It was Neelkamal, his sword drawn. Beside him was
the real Danavi.
“I felt a cold mist enter the room, and then all became
dark!” exclaimed the maid.
No wonder the woman’s voice changed mid-story. No
wonder she seemed different—the demoness had switched
places with the real Danavi!
“Leave Kiran alone!” Neel shouted.
It was only then that I realized the Demon Queen’s sharp-
nailed hands were at my throat.
“Ayiiii!” the rakkhoshi screeched, turning toward Neel.
“There is nothing so upsetting to the digestion as an ungrateful
child!”
I could kind of wiggle my fingers and toes again. Without
her concentration, the demoness’s spell lost its grip pretty
quickly.
 “You aren’t welcome here anymore!” Neel approached the
Rakkhoshi Queen with his sword raised. “What trick is this
that brings you here?”
“Oh, that is where you are very wrong, you source of my
acid reflux, you betrayer from my own womb!” the Queen
cackled, growing into her full size. The poor maid shrieked
and ran out the door.
The Demon Queen was still beautiful, but with pointed
ears, jagged teeth, and enormous horns rising from behind her
crown. She towered above us, her horns brushing the vines on
the ceiling. With another toss of her hair, she froze Neel where
he was standing. I could tell he was trying to move, but
couldn’t.
“Let me go, now!” he ordered. The Queen cackled, her
inhuman voice echoing weirdly.
I ran for my bow and arrow, which I’d put on the floor next
to the bath, but with a motion of her warty finger, the
demoness flung them out of the way. Her eyes raged with fire,
and puffs of smoke shot out of her nostrils.
She rubbed her chest with a clawlike hand. “All those years
just hovering in the shadows, waiting for some newcomer fool
who didn’t know about the rules of my banishment; it gave me
a terrible case of heartburn.” The Queen turned her creepy
smile to me. “But you can thank your little friend here for
inviting me once again into the kingdom.”
“No!” Neel protested.
“I didn’t!” I yelled, even as I remembered how the “maid”
had asked me if she could enter. It was true. I said yes, and by
mistake, I had unleashed this terrible monster.
“For that favor, my slithery princess,” the Queen crowed, “I
will not kill you—at least not today.” She licked her lips with a
black tongue. “But I am afraid I cannot say the same for that
tasty morsel Lalkamal!”
With a thunder-like clap, the demoness vanished into thin
air. Neel struggled in place, still frozen. He howled in a voice
transformed by fear and rage.
“Mother! Ma! No!”
That’s your mother?” I shrieked.
“You should talk!” Neel could obviously move again, and
threw my bow and arrows in my direction as he ran toward the
door. I grabbed them midair. “At least my dad didn’t force me
into exile because he wanted to turn me into a snake!”
“You’re half a rakkhosh, which means half a monster!” I
yelled, threading an arrow from the quiver into my bow.
“And what do you think you are, Princess? Ever wonder
where your nasty side comes from?” Neel snapped even as he
was already running for the courtyard. “I don’t have time for
this! I have to warn my brother!”
I sprinted after him, feeling his words burning in my ears.
If Neel was half a monster, then so was I. I thought about the
last time I saw my parents and how cruel I’d been to them.
Was it because, as they would say in the movies, I had bad
blood?
Being half serpent certainly wasn’t helping my running
stamina, and I was getting winded trying to keep up with
rakkhosh-powered Neel.
“Your mom wouldn’t hurt Lal, would she?” I shouted to his
sprinting back. But the rate at which he was moving told me
all I needed to know.
Obviously, Neel’s mom had a serious case of the wicked
stepmothers. Wanting to eat your stepchildren definitely
ranked up there with all-time evildoer moves. I felt sick. It was
my fault she was after Lal.
 Prince Neelkamal ran like the wind. I guess I hadn’t
noticed before how fast he could move. Or how strong he was.
Or how tall. Or how broad. It had been so easy for him to
defeat the rakkhosh on my front lawn. And yet, he hadn’t
wanted to kill it. Was it all because of his half-demon heritage?
We approached the royal stables, which were glowing in
the evening darkness with an unearthly light. Somewhere, a
crow shrieked and a fox howled. A chill ran through my body.
The demoness had already gotten here!
There was terrified whinnying as Midnight and Snowy
galloped away from the stables toward the woods.
I ran in the direction from where they came, but when I
stumbled into the building, I faced a terrible sight. The
Rakkhoshi Queen stood on the hay in the middle of an empty
stall, a nauseated expression on her face.
“Where is Lal?” Neel thrust his sword at his own mother.
“What have you done with him?”
“Oof! That too-proud boy!” She belched. “That willful
girl!”
“Ma—tell me that you haven’t eaten my brother and Mati!”
“Eaten them? Of course I’ve eaten them! What do you
think I have been waiting for, eh, all these years?” The
rakkhoshi turned her red eyes at her son. “Only you were
always by your brother’s side, my son, you traitor who nursed
at my breast, you were forever protecting him!” She shifted
her piercing gaze to me. “But so lucky I am, isn’t it, that this
girl finally distracted you away from him. If not for her, this
pretty-pretty moon-brat, you would never have left Lalkamal
alone!”
The walls of the stable felt like they were closing in. What
had I done?
 Neel fell to his knees, letting out a demonic yell. “You
won’t get away with this, Mother!”
“Vah, such big, big talk!” the rakkhoshi cackled. “My son
wants to kill me—what a proud maternal moment! But no, for
that you’ll have to find and kill my soul—which is hidden
away somewhere even you will never find, my little matricidal
maniac!”
Rage boiled in my body. Neel was still on the ground in
front of his mother. The demoness might destroy him at any
moment. Like everything else, this was my fault. I had to
protect him.
I aimed the arrow that was still in my bow. The rakkhoshi
was distracted, and I had a clear shot. I closed one eye, and
imagined I was shooting a target behind the gym at school.
The arrow flew straight and true, hitting the Queen in the
middle of the chest.
“Ay-yo!” the demoness exclaimed.
Unfortunately, the next thing she did was to pluck the
arrow out as if it were nothing more than a splinter. “Not a bad
shot for a skinny moon-chickie!” She used the sharpened end
to pick at her teeth.
 Uh-oh. That wasn’t good.
But I’d given Neel time to collect himself, and now he ran
at his mother, his sword raised. The Queen stopped the
weapon with her hand. With a terrible glint in her eye, she
brought the sword to her mouth and licked it. The shining steel
now dripped with gloppy black saliva. Neel grimaced,
throwing it to the ground.
“You think you can kill me with your mortal weapons, you
snotty-nosed smarty-pants?” The demoness’s expression was
pained. “Really, I cannot believe you young people these days!
Just the other day I was telling my interdimensional poison-
brewing club what a disappointment my child was to the
demonic race. You never listen, do you? The only way to kill
me is to find the exact location of my soul!”
 “Ma—how could you?” I was startled to see that there were
tears falling freely from Neel’s eyes. His face was a mask of
pain. “My brother—Mati—what did they ever do to deserve
this?”
“Deserve?” the Queen screeched, thumping herself on the
chest with her words. “How can you talk to me of who
deserves what? I was the king’s senior wife; you are his oldest
son. It’s you who deserves to be the next king, not that puny-
shuny human brother of yours. You should be king, you
disrespectful fruit of my loins, not Lalkamal!”
“I don’t want to be king!” Neel yelled. “Do you think the
people would accept a king who is a half demon? A king with
a mother like you?”
The Rakkhoshi Queen clutched her stomach. “Aiii! Aii!”
she cried. She shook a long taloned finger at me. “May you
have children this ungrateful, my little Luna Bar, so you know
the intestinal agony that only your progeny can give you.”
The demoness turned a shade of clover green. “That
ridiculous, show-offy boy! That Little Prince Fauntleroy!” she
moaned, belching clouds of acidic red smoke. “That prissy-
shissy girl! So noble in her poverty! So sickeningly
honorable!”
Ew. What was going on?
The rakkhoshi began to make disgusting, retching sounds.
“I knew I should not have swallowed without chewing,” she
moaned. “Oh, the gaseous indigestibility of youth! Oh, the
digestive agony of their sugary friendship!”
She was going to lose her lunch. I raised my hands to my
face. This was going to be gross. Way grosser than the corn-
dog-vomiting incident.
 But then the Queen did something that topped the bizarre-
o-meter. As if her mere existence wasn’t bizarre enough. She
stretched her mouth so wide that me, Neel, and the whole
stable could have fit into it. And what I saw in that eternal
blackness, I don’t think I can ever forget.
Because there, in the Demon Queen’s open mouth, were
spinning—could it be?—suns, planets, moons: a whole series
of solar systems.
No. Barometric. Way.
This was heavy stuff.
Something Shady Sadie the Science Lady once said on TV
came rushing into my head. It was about a brand-new
discovery that some astronomers had made: a monster at the
center of the galaxy. It wasn’t really a monster, she’d
explained, but some kind of super-huge black hole they
discovered with powerful telescopes. Apparently, it was so
hungry it gobbled up planets, stars, anything in its way. But
the monster was greedy, and it couldn’t digest everything it
took in. Instead, like a fire hose being aimed at a soda can, half
the stuff it tried to inhale came shooting back out of it. It
proved, Sadie explained, that black holes didn’t just consume
and destroy energy, they created it as well.
Which is why I wasn’t as surprised as I could have been
when the Demon Queen vomited out two enormous spheres—
like little planets, really. One was deep gold and the other a
glowing silver.
“Drat! Dread! Demonic doo-doo!” the rakkhoshi shrieked.
Whoa. Holy public television station. Was Neel’s mom the
monster at the center of the Milky Way? What was it Lal said
about rakkhosh being black holes—spells that had gone
beyond their expiration dates?
 The demoness was still clutching her stomach when she
vanished again in a flash of blinding light. “This isn’t over,
you good-for-nothings, you lazy loafers. You can count on it!”
Her voice and the smell of her belches lingered, but she
was gone.
“What the … ?” Neel stared at the gold and silver balls, and
let out a big sniff.
I walked up to the objects. They weren’t really little
planets, I guess, more about the size of bowling balls. Had I
imagined what I saw in her mouth? Had it been some kind of a
psychedelic dream?
There was a faint red light emanating from the golden
sphere, and the silver one smelled like—what was it? Fresh
cotton and honey.
“It’s them!” I realized. “It’s Lal and Mati!”
At the sound of their names, the spheres began to vibrate
and hum. The gold one even rolled a little, bumping against
Neel’s foot.
“Serves us right for relying on Nosferatu,” Neel muttered,
swiping at his eye.
“Huh?”
“The original Dracula,” he explained, almost to himself.
“Lal and I love that movie. Not like that idiotic teenage
vampire—sparkling skin! Not drinking human blood! How
ridiculous!”
He was talking about one of my favorite books-turned-
movies, but I decided to let the comment go without protest.
Neel was upset, after all.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said in my most soothing, come-
down-from-the-ledge-you-nutter voice. His brother had just
been turned into a bowling ball, and he was debating the
relative merits of different vampire movies?
“No, I’m serious,” Neel insisted. “Vampires. Like—‘I vant
to suck your blood’?”
“Yes, I’m familiar with ‘I vant to suck your blood.’”
“That’s where we got the idea of an enchantment that
would banish my mother’s physical form from our kingdom
unless someone specifically invited her in.”
Oh, that was what all that permission getting was about. In
those old movies, vampires couldn’t enter someone’s house
unless they had an invitation. Something I myself had given
the rakkhoshi.
To quote the demoness herself: Drat. Dread. Demonic doo-
doo.
But something still didn’t make sense. “How did she get
inside in the first place, to change identities with Danavi?”
“She must have ridden in on the mist or in the vapor of a
storm cloud.” Neel rubbed his eyes. “But she couldn’t take on
her physical form until you gave her permission.”
It was all my fault.
“Neel, I’m so sorry …”
“I should have known better.” He shook his head. “I
shouldn’t have listened to you.”
“About what?” I felt so bad for inviting the rakkhoshi into
the kingdom, I didn’t even realize that Neel blamed me for
something else.
“You’re the one who insisted we leave Lal alone.” Neel
kicked at the ground in frustration. “Why did I listen to you? A
stranger! Someone who has no idea what she’s talking about!
Someone so selfish she never thinks about other people’s
feelings!”
“It’s not all my fault!” I shouted, my shame and horror
making me defensive. “What about you? You didn’t think you
should tell me you were a half demon and your mom was out
to snack on Lal? Or that you two had come up with some
horror-movie spell to keep her out of the kingdom?”
Neel lifted the two spheres onto his shoulders without
another word. But his jaw was working like he was chewing
and swallowing down bitter emotions.
“Look, Neel, I’m sorry,” I said, blinking back tears. “I’m so
sorry. For your brother, for Mati, your mother, for everything.”
Still, the prince said nothing.
“Do you hear me? I’m sorry! I’m going to help make this
right—I promise!”
“Don’t you get it?” Neel’s eyes were shining with water,
but he ground his words out with a fury that startled me. “You
can’t do anything to make this right! Nothing will ever be right
again!”
The silence was painful as we walked back to the main part of
the palace. Neel set a fast pace even though he carried both the
golden and silver spheres, and didn’t look over at me once. My
emotions slingshotted between rage and guilt. How dare he
blame me? I thought one minute. How could he not? I thought
the next.
We walked down a marble hallway decorated with shields
and curved swords. The ceiling sparkled with gems set in
patterns to look like stars, moons, and swirling galaxies. There
were lacy cutouts in the walls that let the breeze waft through,
and I could see one after another fountain-filled courtyard
stretching off in either direction. At the end of this hall was the
throne room, and in front of the throne room stood a pair of
moustachioed guards in tunics and baggy pants. The swords in
their belts glittered. But they didn’t stop us, instead just bowed
to the prince and let us through.
Before the royal audience chamber was a reception area
separated from the throne room by a curtain. There were a
bunch of people crowded there—merchants and customers
arguing about who cheated who, nervous villagers waiting to
complain about their landlords, courtiers in silk saris and
tunics just milling around for no apparent reason. The
glittering curtain parted and a gray-haired man in regal
clothes, gold earrings, and miles of gold necklaces came out.
He bowed to Neel, adding a kind of unnecessary set of hand
waves.
“Your Royal Highness, welcome home.”
 Neel inclined his head. “Lord Bulbul.”
“I am the Royal Minister of Sweets,” the elderly man said
to me with a flourish, before he caught full sight of me. Then I
saw his expression change into disgust. Man, what was this
dude’s problem?
In the meantime, the guard parted the entrance curtain and
Neel walked through, leaving me behind with Lord Bulbul. As
I watched the prince’s retreating back, the hollow feeling in
my stomach grew. To make matters worse, I noticed the
minister guy was still staring at me. Following his gaze, I
realized there was a gloppy mess on my beautiful tunic that
looked as if I’d been playing with tar. To top it off, there was a
bunch of long rakkhoshi hairs stuck in it.
“Eww.” I tried—pretty ineffectively—to clean myself off
with the cloth that the guard supplied me. Unfortunately, I just
smeared the stain even more over the silk top.
It was only then I realized that Lord Bulbul wasn’t bothered
by my clothes, he was grimacing at the cobra mark on my arm.
“A bad omen,” he hissed, spitting in my direction. “An evil
eye has touched you.” The minister backed away. He looked
like he wished he had a bunch of garlic to ward me off.
This would have been a good time for my half-monster side
to kick in, I thought, so I could smite this guy to death with an
evil glare or something. But instead, I just stood there feeling
small, and not particularly smite-y. Or snaky. Neel’s mom had
called me a moon-chickie. Maybe I took more after my
biological mom? I could only hope. Although what a moon
maiden was like I had no idea. And I’d never heard of anyone
moonbeaming someone else to death.
Finally, the guard just pushed me along. There was nothing
else to be done but to follow Neel into the throne room.
 I kept my hand over my scar, held my breath, and prayed
no one would notice me. I didn’t feel any more regal now that
I’d found out about my biological parents. In fact, I felt like an
ordinary sixth grader from New Jersey masquerading in pretty
clothes (that I’d already ruined).
In front of me was a long, carpeted aisle lined on both sides
with all sorts of jabbering lords and ladies of the kingdom.
Everyone was decked out in blinding color combinations—
magenta and kelly green, turquoise and orange, violet and hot
pink. The men were in turbans, chains, and earrings; the
women in saris embroidered with gold thread and real pieces
of glass, their dark hair threaded with heavy jewels. They were
flirting, arguing, eating, laughing. Everyone, even the pretty
ladies, seemed to be talking with their mouths full. No one
seemed particularly interested in what anyone else had to say,
but really interested in hearing their own voices. I shouldn’t
have been nervous about anyone noticing me. A woman in a
chartreuse sari and magenta blouse belched delicately, but no
one gave me a second glance as I walked toward the royal
dais.
Neel stood in front of his father’s throne. Its back was a
golden peacock’s open feathers, and its armrests each a roaring
lion’s head.
As I approached, I realized Neel was mid-story.
“… and then she vomited these out,” he explained. “I’m
pretty sure they are the Prince Lalkamal and the stable
master’s daughter, Mati.” The golden and silver spheres
vibrated and rolled around in front of the throne.
The Raja was weeping fat, embarassing tears. He looked a
lot like Lal, but older and softer. Precious gems sparkled from
his ears and the rings decorating every single one of his
fingers. And on his shoulder, like yet another ornament, was
the golden bird, Tuntuni.
“Our son and heir!” the Raja groaned. “How could you do
this? Your only job was to protect your brother and future
soverign—with your life if necessary! What have you done?
What have you done?”
Neel’s face grew stony, his dark brows knitting together.
“Father, I swear I will do everything in my power to bring my
brother back.”
“Not everything!” the Raja shrieked, jumping up and
almost dislodging Tuni from his shoulder. “You promised to
control that part of yourself!”
“You know that’s not what I meant!” Neel practically
growled, and the Raja flinched, sitting quickly back down in
his seat.
I might have flinched a little too. Neel appeared scarier
than I’d ever seen him look. He was even shaking a little, as if
desperately trying to control his temper. It was like watching
someone put a lid on a volcano.
“I don’t know anything about you anymore, boy.” The
Raja’s words were angry but his voice was trembling. He
looked like he was going to say something else, but was
interrupted by a number of women bursting into the throne
room.
“This is all of your causing!” A stunning woman in a
buttercup-yellow sari and diamond jewelry knocked over a
bunch of courtiers to rush toward the throne. When she got to
the golden ball, she collapsed, pounding her fists on the
marble floor. A gaggle of similarly dressed women—in
necklaces and bangles, diamond nose rings and tiaras—
followed buttercup lady into the room, and, after a minute of
watching her cry, began to wail too.
“To see our queens so distraught is terribly vexing to us.”
The Raja blew his nose into a large, lacy handkerchief.
Neel’s face lost a little of that thunderous expression, and
he rolled his eyes in annoyance.
Ah, this must be Lal’s mother and the other stepmothers.
The head queen’s long-lashed eyes flashed at Neel as she
screeched, “This is your fault. You are no prince of this realm,
demon-born spawn!”
Whoa. Lal’s mom was giving the Rakkhoshi Queen a run
for her status as wickedest stepmother of the year.
Instead of exploding in rage, Neel’s voice took on an icy,
sarcastic civility. “How pleasant to see you too, my royal
stepmother,” he mocked, bowing low.
The buttercup queen then turned her venom on me. “It is
you who has brought this evil wind into our kingdom again,
you moon rock, you viper child, you serpent in girl’s
clothing!”
“My darling lady,” the Raja cooed, “this is the Princess
Kiranmala, exiled these many years to the land of”—he
shuddered—“two dimensions. What will she think of us if we
behave so? Come, my dear, you must not distress yourself. We
do not desire you to become ill!”
“Royal husband.” Now the queen’s tone was cloying. “You
will exile them, won’t you? You will banish them from the
kingdom for what they have done to my son, your heir, the
future Raja of this kingdom?”
I wanted to hate her, but she was right. I had done this to
her son, twice over. Once by separating him from Neel, and
then again by inviting the Rakkhoshi Queen into the kingdom.
I felt smaller than a cockroach and only half as loved.
“My royal stepmother,” Neel said, his voice tight, “Princess
Kiranmala didn’t do this to Lal. It was my fault entirely. No
one else’s.”
Neel’s words confused me. Why was he taking all the
blame?
“Do not address me, boy!” the woman shrieked at Neel.
“And do not tell me about this”—she indicated me—“snake in
the grass, this asp, this cobra dropping!”
Neel kept his eyes fixed straight ahead, but I could see that
muscle twitching at his jaw that told me how angry he really
was. The volcano, it seemed, was bubbling again.
One of the other queens was staring at my clothes. “You do
realize that you have, like, demon snot on your shirt?” she
twitted through pink lips. “I mean, seriously grody!”
“Yes, and it’s demon spit, thanks,” I muttered.
“My queens, we observe your sister-queen is a bit
distressed.” The Raja waved his handkerchief in the direction
of Lal’s mother. “Perhaps you can remove her from the throne
room and allow her to get some well-deserved rest.”
“I refuse to leave without my son! I will not leave without
the golden ball!” Lal’s mother shouted, but at the Raja’s slight
shake of the head, several queens grabbed each of her arms
and legs and began forcing her out of the room.
“It’s all of your faults! You all did this to my precious
boy!” the queen yelled as she was bustled away. “Not to
mention all the time he spent with that horse-girl, that stable
wench! No good can come from mixing with the poor, I tell
you! No good can come from letting the son of a rakkhoshi
and the daughter of a snake loose in the kingdom!”
 The entire throne room stayed quiet as the queen’s rants
became less and less audible. Then everyone started jabbering
again as if nothing had happened. I was surprised the Raja
didn’t even seem embarrassed. He was probably used to the
drama. He actually looked pretty chipper as he picked up some
sweets from a silver platter. I remembered that Neel had said
Lord Bulbul’s title was Minister of Sweets. Now I understood
how important that position would be in this kingdom. The
Raja scarfed down a number of desserts all at the same time.
“This one has real silver sliced on top,” he said as he
popped a diamond-shaped sandesh into his already full mouth.
Some of the ministers seated to his left clapped, as if
impressed by their Raja’s dessert-eating abilities. For his part,
the Raja looked ridiculously pleased by their approval.
“Now where were we?” the Raja mused when he was done
smirking for his court. “What was it we were talking about?”
He had disgusting globs of molasses hanging from his
moustache hairs.
I stole a glance at Neel, whose brown skin was turning
seriously ruddy. I worried the lava of his rage was about to
bubble up and out.
“We were talking about your younger son, Your Majesty.”
My voice was thin and nervous. “He got turned into a golden
sphere?”
“Oh, yes.” The Raja swallowed, then whipped out his
handkerchief to dab his lips and eyes. “We are so very
dismayed at this unexpected turn of events.” Of course, his
dismay didn’t stop him from shoving some more sandesh in
his mouth.
“I’m sure you are, sire,” I said quickly.
 “We are even more distressed,” mumbled the Raja through
his stuffed mouth, “that our son was with that inappropriate
friend of his. The daughter of a stable master! Really!”
“Father.” Neel spoke through clenched teeth. “I said I
would do whatever it takes to bring the Prince Lalkamal back,
and I will.”
“And Mati,” I added.
“Indeed,” the Raja said to his son, “you will bring your
brother home, or you will not come home at all.”
“Without my brother, I have no home here.” Neel bit off the
words like they were poison.
I felt horrible. If not for me, Lal and Mati would be with us
right now. If I’d just believed their stories, maybe my parents
would be safe at home too. I straightened my shoulders,
feeling that unfamiliar warrior spirit in my stomach. Even if he
hated me, even if he was more rakkhosh than human, I would
help Neel get his brother back. And I would get my parents
back too. There was no other option. This was my destiny.
I turned to the yellow bird, who was perched on the arm of
the Raja’s throne. “Minister Tuni, what do we do? How can
we get them back in their old form?”
“In the East of North of East, the Maya Pahar climbs—”
Tuntuni squawked, pecking crumbs out of the Raja’s open
palm.
“Yeah, yeah, we heard you the first time,” I interrupted.
“So we have to go the Maya Pahar to save Lal and Mati—the
same place my parents are?”
“All your solutions,” the bird agreed, “lie in the Mountains
of Illusions.”
“Okay, great, let’s go!”
 “Wait.” The Raja stopped me with an upturned hand. “Do
you know how to get there?”
I was surprised. “It’s like the bird—”
A squawk of protest.
“… Minister Tuni said. In the East of North of East. I
mean, wherever that is. Right?”
“Stop being such a ruler, Kiran,” Neel snapped. “Here,
north isn’t always north. East isn’t always east …”
“Oh, right.” I sagged in defeat and scowled at the bird, who
was hopping from one of the Raja’s armrests to the other. I
was no closer to finding Ma and Baba. No closer to helping
Lal and Mati back into their human forms. Maybe Neel was
right. Maybe I couldn’t do anything right.
Unexpectedly, it was Tuntuni who seemed to notice my
plummeting mood. “Say, Princess, what do you call a sad
bird?” he squawked.
“This is really not the time …” Neel began, but I blurted
out the answer.
“Easy. A bluebird.”
“Eggs-ceptional,” Tuni chirped, flying onto my shoulder.
For whatever reason, that made me feel a little better.
“In a place where nothing—not even countries—stay put,
it’s useful to have a moving map. Why don’t you use yours?”
Both the Raja and Neel snapped around to look at me. “You
have a moving map?” father and son asked at the same time.
“Jinx.” It popped out of my mouth before I even thought
about it.
“What is this jinx?” the Raja asked. “We are not familiar
with this custom.”
 “Well, if you say something at the same time, then one
person can say ‘jinx’ and the other person can’t talk until the
first person, or somebody else, says the other person’s name
…”
“Oh, bullock’s biscuits, there’s no time for that now,” Neel
yelled. “You have a moving map and you didn’t tell me this
whole time?”
“I … I … uh, I didn’t think it was important. What’s a
moving map anyway?”
“You didn’t think it was important!” Neel shouted, while
his father explained, “A moving map is what you need if
you’re going to a place that doesn’t stay still. It’s a map that
knows how to keep up and tell you where somewhere is at any
particular time. They’re very rare and most difficult to find.”
Neel was still ranting, his voice getting louder, “If I’d
known you had a moving map, I wouldn’t have even come
home to talk to Tuni, and if we hadn’t come here …”
He didn’t have to say it. I finished the thought for him. “If
we hadn’t come here, then Lal and Mati would still be okay.”
Bullock’s biscuits was right. Here was yet another way that
I was directly responsible for everything going wrong.
I felt worse than ever.
What is this thing?”
We were back in the bathing room with the hanging vines,
where I’d left my backpack. The mood between Neel and me
was still tense, but at least he was talking to me. Together, we
examined Ma’s map, which looked just the same as the first
time I’d seen it. As opposed to being covered with images of
roads, mountains, lakes, or rivers, the entire page was smudgy
and blank.
I reread the birthday card, the last message I had from my
parents to me. “It says right here it’s a moving map.”
Neel stared at the blank paper with a serious expression, as
if commanding the map to appear.
We were both quiet for a minute. Then Neel held the paper
up to his face and sniffed it.
“What are you doing?”
“Just what I suspected,” Neel replied. “It smells fishy.”
“Very punny.”
“I’m serious.” Neel’s grim face reminded me that he was
only tolerating me out of some sense of princely duty. “There’s
a map here; it’s just invisible. It’s probably coated with Tangra
fish juice.”
“Some kind of invisible ink?”
Neel nodded.
 Why not? A map that keeps up with moving land masses
drawn with invisible fish juice. It certainly wasn’t the strangest
thing I had heard about so far. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the
kind of atlas we sold in our convenience store—the most
exotic things on those were, like, the Garden State Parkway
and the New Jersey Turnpike. (Though I used to think the
Holland Tunnel sounded super exotic, like it was in Europe or
something, but it’s actually in Jersey City, New Jersey, which,
in case you haven’t been, isn’t really that exotic at all.)
I squinted at the paper. “How do we decode it? With secret
spy rings?”
“Let me look it up.” Neel fished a battered little book out of
his pocket. The cover read:
The Adventurer’s Guide to Rakkhosh, Khokkosh, Bhoot,
Petni, Doito, Danav, Daini, and Secret Code
Khogen Prasad Das

“Rakkhosh I know, decoding I get,” I said. “But what are

all those other words?”
“Oh, different kinds of demons, ghosts, witches, goblins,
that sort of thing. K. P. Das is a senior demonologist of the
highest caliber. He’s one of Lal’s and my tutors.”
Neel’s voice was carefully neutral, and I could practically
feel the distance between us. I took a big breath.
“Um … Neel?”
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I’m really …”
Neel lifted his face from his book and looked, for the first
time in what felt like forever, straight at me. I couldn’t tell if
he was upset or angry or … hungry. I realized how alone we
were and felt a spasm of fear.
But his words weren’t as much scary as they were just sad.
“I’m … I’m just going to need some time, okay? I just … I’m
going to need some time before I can forgive you.”
I felt like crying, but I just jammed my nails into my fist.
“No, I get it, that’s cool.”
“So let’s just get on with what we’ve got to do, all right?”
“No, fine.” I felt like I wasn’t getting enough air. “Good
idea. Lots of people to rescue.”
“Lal would have just remembered how to decode Tangra
fish juice.” Neel sighed. “Decoding’s my worst subject.”
“What’s your best?” I asked in as normal a voice as I could
manage while still trying to stuff down tears.
Neel flipped to the glossary and began scanning the Ts.
“Talons, Tambourines … Here it is, Tangra,” he read. “My
best subject is demon slaying of course. Even though I believe
more in demonic violence prevention and restorative justice
than actual demon slaying.”
“Oh.”
 It couldn’t be easy, I guessed, for Neel to be half demon
himself and have to hear all the time about how much people
hated rakkhosh. He knew—maybe even better than me—what
it was like to feel different.
“Well, Professor Das says here that there are only three
ways to decode something written with Tangra fish juice.”
“All right, shoot.”
“One.” Neel counted on his fingers. “Blow a powder made
from ground-up rakkhosh bones on it.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
“You see any dead rakkhosh lying around here? And no, a
half rakkhosh doesn’t count. Even if it did, I’m not sacrificing
my bones for your map.”
“Fine.” My face was as serious as I could keep it.
Neel looked huffy. Then he realized I was joking. “Very
clever. You’re such a comedian.” He concentrated again on the
book. “Two, dip the map in the waters from the River Jogai.”
“Much easier than killing a rakkhosh,” I said, “so let’s go;
where is this river?”
“Dried up years ago.”
“Better and better.” I sighed. “Okay, and what’s the third?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Just tell me,” I insisted.
Neel read from the book. “Well, the third way to decode
something written in Tangra fish juice is to look at it through
the prism of a python jewel.”
I had a bad feeling. “A what?”
 “The jewel from a powerful python’s head. And of course,
the place to get that is the underworld Kingdom of Serpents.”
He waited a beat. “Your father’s kingdom.”
“My birth father,” I corrected. I’d made up my mind: I
wasn’t going to buy into that movie-of-the-week sap—like I
was supposed to run into the arms of some dude who’d tried to
kill me when I was a baby. Just because he’d donated his
genes to my existence didn’t make him Daddy Dearest. I
mean, the Rakkhoshi Queen was Neel’s mom and had actually
raised him, but you didn’t see him making any “I Heart My
Demonic Mama” clay spitoons for her in art class.
“It’s our only choice. Luckily, I have a working map to the
serpent kingdom. And there are no other ways to decode
something written in Tangra fish juice. At least that exist in
this world.”
“What—there’s another way?” I jumped on his hesitation.
Neel nodded. “Lal and I discovered it by mistake when we
were trying to get to your house. We didn’t realize the New
Jersey map we had was encoded—probably written with
Bhetki fish scales—until it was too late. We didn’t think we’d
ever make it to Parsippany in time to save you when Lal
knocked his Giant Gulpie over on the paper.”
I remembered Lal’s love of soda fountains and fizzy drinks.
And what was it that they had been arguing about when I
opened the door? If it wasn’t for that Giant Gulpie, we
wouldn’t have found her at all?
“So he spilled soda on the map, and the hidden ink showed
itself?”
“Yup. I don’t suppose you brought some with you?”
I shook my head, and was about to say something, when
Neel went on. “Wait a minute, what’s this writing on the other
side of the map?”
“What?” Maybe Ma hadn’t kept everything encoded.
But the opposite side of the map just held a note, written in
Ma’s handwriting:
You might get thirsty on your travels. Why not take some pek-
pek with you?
Blast. That didn’t help. It was also a code, just a lot simpler
than the one in Tangra juice. No one but me and my parents
would know that as a kid, I pronounced the word for a brand
of soda like peksi and that, over the years, the word had
become pek-pek in our family.
I explained that to Neel, who wasn’t that amused by my
childhood anecdote. “Your Ma wanted to make sure no one
else could follow the map to Maya Pahar,” he growled, “and
she gave you this clue to figure out how to decode the map.
She went to all this trouble and you couldn’t bother to bring a
can of soda with you?”
“Uh, if you’ll remember, Your Imperial Oh-So-Super Royal
Highness, I was a little occupied right when we left New
Jersey. I was saving Lal’s butt from that rakkhosh on my lawn,
while you, his big, strong half-demon older brother, sat around
and did nothing.”
“I would have gotten around to saving him,” Neel
countered. “I saved you, didn’t I? Not that you seem
particularly grateful.”
“Grateful?” I snorted. “Since I’ve met you, my house has
been destroyed, my parents have disappeared, I’ve almost
been eaten by a tantruming transit officer, then practically got
arrested for stealing someone’s moustache”—I took a breath
—“I got beaned with guava seeds by a delusional bird, and
pretty near got devoured by your demon mother.”
 “And you’ve loved every minute of it,” Neel drawled,
finally smiling for the first time in what felt like forever.
The thing was, I kind of had.
Neel and I left almost right away to find a python jewel in the
Kingdom of Serpents. Without one, we couldn’t read the
moving map and had no hope of finding Maya Pahar.
The journey started off fine enough. The night sky was
clear with perfect visibility. But it wasn’t long after we started,
Neel on Midnight and me on Snowy, that I knew something
was wrong. At first, it was just a feeling in the cold night air
that made goose bumps come up on my arms. Then it was the
faint flapping sound that I could hear off-time from either
Midnight or Snowy’s wing motions. Finally, it was the smell:
the sort of scent that filled up our convenience store van once
when Baba forgot to close the vents and we were driving right
behind a giant garbage truck.
Neel and Midnight slowed down, until they were flying
next to Snowy and me.
“I think there’s someone following us,” I said, gesturing
behind us into the night.
“Rakkhosh,” Neel said flatly. “I smelled them almost as
soon as we left.”
“We’re being followed by demons? What do we do?”
Sensing my tension, Snowy bucked and snorted. “Whoa,
boy, take it easy.” I patted his soft neck.
“We ride faster and try to lose them. If we’re lucky, it’s just
a coincidence, and they’re heading somewhere else and won’t
follow.” With that, Neel whispered something into first
Midnight’s ear and then Snowy’s, and the pakkhiraj horses
took off like shots. I almost couldn’t catch my breath, we were
riding so fast, but as soon as I got used to our new speed, I
realized the sound of chasing wings had also grown faster.
And louder. Not to mention how intense the smell of garbage
was getting.

“We’re going to have to outrun them,” Neel called from

Midnight. “Rakkhosh are afraid of snakes. They’ll never
follow us all the way to the Kingdom of Serpents.”
I really hoped he was right. Midnight swooped to the left in
a complex and unexpected zigzag and Snowy followed. I
couldn’t help letting out a choked scream.
As we regained altitude, though, something else made me
want to scream even more.
“Neel is dreamy! Neel is sweet!” a cackling voice called
from somewhere behind me. “Prince Neel’s toes are a great
treat!”
 That was all the incentive I needed to urge Snowy to go
faster. The rakkhoshi knew who we were. This was no
coincidence. They were after us. They were going to catch up
to us soon. They were already telling us how they were going
to eat us, starting with Neel’s feet. I remembered what Baba
had said about rakkhosh using the bones of their victims as
toothpicks, and felt like I was going to die for sure.
But when I looked over at Neel, I realized he didn’t look as
scared as he did just a minute ago. In fact, he kept looking
over his shoulder with a confused expression, like—could it
be?—he recognized the rakkhoshi’s voice?
I took the risk of looking back at the demons now close
behind us. Though it was dark, they were lit up with an inner
green glow. They were a group of young rakkhoshis in saris
and earrings, their unbound dark hair flying, wings flapping,
and fangs glinting in the unnatural green light. They were
flying in a bunch, their clawed hands outstretched in our
direction, with kind of goofy expressions on their faces. Could
I be imagining it, or did they look more like lovesick demonic
cheerleaders than marauding murderers?
“Don’t be frightened, don’t be blue! Don’t run, dear prince,
for we love you!”
And then chanting rhythmically: “Princie! Princie! He’s so
fly! We’ll eat his friend if she’s nearby!”
They said this with a tittering that sounded, for all the
world, the way that Jovi and her gang sounded when they were
talking about their favorite TV stars and pop singers.
I urged Snowy forward, drawing even with Midnight. “You
have demon groupies?”
“It’s, uh, nothing,” Neel said. But I noticed he kept his gaze
straight ahead. “Just some rakkhoshis who sometimes send fan
mail and care packages of nasty baked goods from Demon
Land—usually without enough postage.” Neel pulled at
Midnight’s reigns and made a sharp right, and Snowy
followed.
“Then how did you recognize their voices?”
“Oh, right.” Neel sounded uncomfortable. “They also
sometimes leave voice messages, and, like, send me mix-tapes
of their favorite songs—but really, that’s it!”
“Really? That’s it? They don’t send you selfies of them
biting the heads off tarantulas or anything?” I screamed as I
tried to hold on to my horse’s reigns with almost numb fingers.
“Okay, maybe a couple times,” Neel shouted over to me.
“You probably shouldn’t risk getting anywhere near them. The
Neelkamalas have been known to get a little, erm, jealous.”
“They call themselves the Neelkamalas?”
What the heck! Neel was the word for blue, and kamala
was the name for an orange—so these idiot rakkhoshis had
dubbed themselves the blue oranges? Being eaten by a
rakkhosh was bad enough. I really didn’t want to be killed by
some demonic fangirls with no taste in names.
Snowy flapped his wings in rhythm with Midnight’s as the
horses continued in their headlong gallop away from the
rakkhoshis.
“What’s the matter? What’s up? If that’s your girlfriend,
we’ll chew her up!” yelled the Neelkamalas.
“Get lost, freaks!” I shouted over my shoulder. “You picked
a terrible group name and your rhymes stink!”
In hindsight, I’ll admit, insulting lovesick demoness
fangirls probably wasn’t the smartest decision I’ve ever made.
The rakkhoshis seemed to redouble their efforts to reach us.
 “Princess stew! Such a treat! Your girlfriend’s gonna be
good to eat!”
“Neel! Do something! Your groupies are going to kill me!”
I screamed as the closest rakkhoshi, in a checkered sari with
clashing colors, reached her dirty nails toward my horse. She
caught a bit of Snowy’s tail, but lost it when the animal bucked
and increased his speed.
“Almost there!” Neel pointed down to the green land below
us. “You better head home, ladies! Unless you want to join us
in the Kingdom of Serpents!”
“Snakies bite! Snakies stink!” The Neelkamalas gnashed
their teeth in my direction. “We’d like the princess’s blood to
drink!”
But they were already slowing down, and the distance
between the rakkhoshi girl gang and our horses was
increasing.
“Better luck next time!” I called to the now retreating
demonesses. “And by the way, I’m not his girlfriend! He’s all
yours!”
“You don’t know how to leave a good thing alone, do
you?” Neel griped.
The horses began to descend. The sun was just rising when
we landed next to a glassy hilltop lake surrounded by a thick
forest of trees.
After we landed and dismounted, Neel turned to face me.
“You okay?”
“You almost got me killed just there!” I pushed him with all
my might. My hands were freezing cold, but he was like a
furnace—probably another annoying perk of his rakkhosh
blood. “What is wrong with you? You couldn’t warn me that
you were some kind of rakkhoshi heartthrob?”
 “Hey, watch it.” Neel grinned, looking stupidly proud of
himself. “It’s not my fault that I have an interspecies sort of
charm.”
“Who told you that?” I scoffed. “Those selfie-sending
cannibals?”
The rising sun reflected like crazy off the mirrored surface
of the lake, so that we were bathed in this shimmering, golden
light. The ancient trees rustled all around us. The air was crisp
and cool. The beauty of the surroundings did nothing to
diminish the irritation I was feeling. The Neelkamalas girl
gang had almost snacked on my limbs back there!
I shivered, rubbing at my goose-bumpy arms.
“Sorry.” Neel pulled out a coat from his saddlebag and
threw it around my shoulders. “I should have remembered you
weren’t too warmly dressed.”
“Don’t think this makes up for almost getting me killed,” I
snapped even as I cuddled into his warm coat. It smelled like
him.
“Nah, I’d never think that.” Neel smiled in a way that made
me feel all confused.
“I’m serious,” I said, my face heating up and voice rising.
“I mean, how do I know you’re not a secret double agent or
something? Really working for the demons? Maybe you
wanted me to invite your mother into the kingdom! Maybe
you wanted me to blame myself! Maybe you actually wanted
your mother to …” I let my voice trail off. What was I saying?
“Eat Lal and Mati?” Neel asked. “Is that what you were
going to say? That I wanted my mother to transform my
brother and friend into this?” He indicated the gold and silver
spheres resting on one side of his saddlebags.
 I felt the shame rise like steam from within me, and wished
I could stuff my stupid words back in my mouth. “No, I didn’t
mean …”
“Yeah, I think you did.” Neel ran his hand harshly through
his hair. “I have every reason to hate you, you know? Every
reason. But I’m still here, helping you find your parents,
helping you not get killed. And what do you do? Insult me at
every opportunity!”
“Hate me?” My stomach went all wibbly-wobbly at his
awful words, and I could feel myself almost shaking. “Hate
me? What about all the reasons I have to hate you?”
“Right, because I’m a ‘secret double agent,’ as you put it,”
Neel snapped. “You’re totally wacked, you know that? I don’t
know why I even try with you!”
“You know, I don’t know either,” I shouted. “And maybe
you shouldn’t anymore; what do you think about that?”
I pelted off, half expecting Neel to chase behind me. When he
didn’t, I let out a sob but still couldn’t let myself cry. I wasn’t
about to start doing dumb cliché things like crying over boys.
I bit back my tears, pushing branches and leaves aside as I
ran into the beautiful wilderness, away from the shining lake.
The moss was soft under my feet and the trees all thick with
greenery. There was a gentle breeze, making it seem like the
leaves were dancing all around me.
I was well out of sight of the lake’s shores when I heard
something more than freaky. It came from my right: a rustling
in the trees, a cracking of branches. Oh gods, it was probably
one of rakkhoshi girls, braving the Kingdom of Serpents to
come and get me! Why had I been so moronic and told them
“better luck next time”? As Baba always said, only a fool
poked a sleeping tiger. I don’t know what he would say about
someone who poked a flying rakkhosh.
I reached for my new bow, only to realize that I’d left it and
my quiver hooked on Snowy’s saddle. Stupid, Kiran, stupid,
stupid, stupid! I looked around for a fallen branch I could use
as a club, but there was nothing big enough. I’d have to take
her with my hands. I took a big breath, raised my fists as I’d
seen Lal do back in Parsippany, and clenched them hard. I
channeled all the anger I’d felt toward Neel now into thinking
about how I’d defeat a rakkhosh with my bare fists. I had to
believe I could do it. Failure was not an option. Not only Ma
and Baba, but now Lal and Mati were counting on me too. If I
could just keep the element of surprise.
 The rustling was louder now, and I heard some raspy
breathing and coughing. The sounds were all coming from
behind a large clump of bushes. Fists raised to protect my face,
I rounded the foliage with careful steps and then jumped.
“Got you!” My mind whirling with self-preservation and
not much else, I launched myself at the intruder, tackling the
creature to the ground. Somehow, the target was smaller than I
thought it would be. And squishier than I thought a rakkhosh
should be. Then I realized there were a bunch of yellow
feathers shooting into the air from my arms.
Wait a minute, this wasn’t a demon.
“Why in the world are you strangling Tuntuni?” It was
Neel, having followed me through the woods. “I know he’s a
pain, but I really think you’re overreacting.”
The bird was a disaster. Bleary-eyed, missing feathers, and
with some leaves stuck in one wing.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry! Are you okay?” I disentangled my
hands from around the bird’s neck and tried to smooth some of
his ruffled feathers. “How did you get here?”
“What … do … you … call … a … bird … who’s … out
… of … breath?” Tuntuni panted.
I petted and cooed at the obviously shell-shocked bird, but
Neel asked, “What?”
“A … puffin!”
“Shhh …” I soothed the little yellow bird I’d just almost
killed. “No more bad jokes now. Save your breath.”
“Have … you … ever … tried … to … keep … up … with
… a … flying … horse?” he wheezed. “I’ve been flying all
night!”
“Why were you following us?” Neel demanded.
 “Only … because … the Raja … insisted.” Tuni coughed.
“Doesn’t trust you to finish the job, Princie … thinks you’re as
much of a slacker as I do.”
“You’re here to spy on us?”
“I’m here to make sure you ding-dongs do the job right!”
Tuntuni squawked. “But I didn’t think I’d have to chase a
pakkhiraj, hide from those boy-crazy rakkhoshis, and then get
attacked by you, Princess! The Raja is going to have to give
me a serious pay raise after this—I mean, benefits, stock
options, hardship pay, the works!”
“All right, all right,” Neel said. “Don’t get your tail feathers
in a bunch.”
Tuni pointed a yellow wing over my shoulder. “Hey,
dummies, what’s that?”
“Where?”
Neel and I both turned to where the bird was pointing. I
didn’t understand what I was looking at. The ground looked
like it was moving.
“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.
Without a word, Neel grabbed my hand. Not romantic or
anything. Just hard. Really hard.
“Ouch!” I tried to pull away, but Neel ignored me.
“Move!” he ordered, yanking me back toward the horses.
He ran almost full-out, pulling me along, until we reached a
grove of trees to the side of the lake, with Tuntuni squawking
beside us.
Snowy and Midnight lifted their heads to greet us, but then
whinnied—shrill and fierce. The noise shot a ripple of fear
down my spine. I just had a chance to grab my weapons from
Snowy’s saddle when, with flapping wings, the horses took off
into the distant sky, the golden and silver spheres still tucked
in Midnight’s saddlebags.
“Wait, the horses …”
I stumbled after Neel, my legs tripping over themselves. He
wasn’t letting go of my wrist and I couldn’t seem to get my
balance. We finally stopped beside an old gnarled tree with a
lot of knobbly branches, and I looked at him, confused.
“Kiran, hurry!” Neel shoved me up the rough trunk of the
tree. “Grab that branch!”
He was starting to really freak me out.
“What is going on?” After I managed to pull myself up to
the lowest branch, Neel clambered up behind me. Then, with a
panicky glance toward the ground, he dragged me to a branch
even higher than the first. When he finally let me sit, I turned
on him.
“What the—” I stopped short as a shaking Tuntuni crash-
landed on the branch next to me. Some more of his tail
feathers were missing.
“Look down, Kiran,” Neel said. “Look!”
I squinted to see what he was pointing at. At first, I thought
that my eyes were playing tricks on me. I could swear the
grass was moving. Then it seemed like the very ground itself
was slithering. With a queasy start, I realized what I was
seeing.
“Holy moly, there are thousands of snakes down there!” I
met Neel’s own wide-eyed stare with my own.
“Maybe hundreds of thousands.”
Tuntuni shuddered. “Oh, I hate snakes!”
From my perch on the tree, I could scan the area all the
way around the lake. And what I saw made my skin crawl.
From every direction, scores of snakes were slithering their
way toward the lake. They occupied every square inch of land.
Cobras, pythons, boa constrictors, asps, rattlesnakes, and a lot
of kinds of snakes I’d never seen before and couldn’t identify.
And didn’t want to identify. Big ones, small ones, fat ones,
thin ones. There were so many snakes that the aggressive ones
crawled over the slower ones. Some of those who got crawled
over didn’t get up again. It was like a snake stampede.
“They’re nocturnal,” Tuntuni chirped. “They hunt at night
and go to sleep in the daytime. It’s morning, so they’re all
coming home.”
The bird was right. The sun had risen even higher in the
sky, and as its rays reached across the entire surface of the
lake, the water itself became almost transparent. And then an
elaborate, arched doorway opened on the water itself, and the
snakes streamed down through the passage.
“There’s the entrance to the Kingdom of Serpents.”
“We’re going to have to go down there, right, to get the
python jewel?”
Neel nodded, our past argument apparently forgotten in the
face of our certain deaths.
“We can’t; we’ll get poisoned by all those snakes,” Tuni
protested.
“Pythons and boas don’t have poison, they just squeeze you
to death,” Neel corrected, chewing on a fingernail.
“Details!” Tuni squawked. “All I know is we’re going to
die, I tell you! We’re going to die!”
I tried to calm the bird down by telling him a joke.
“Hey, Tuni, do you know what they call a bird who can
open doors?”
 “A para-keet?” Neel suggested distractedly.
“No, a kiwi!” I said, but poor Tuntuni just kept burbling,
“We’re going to die, we’re going to die,” at regular,
demoralizing intervals.
It took more than an hour for the snakes to all slither down
through the open doorway in the lake. The sun was fully in the
sky before we made our way down to solid ground again. In
fact, there were still a few snakes slithering their way toward
the lake when we came down, but we had to risk it. Neel
figured that the doorway might close up again after all the
snakes had gone within.
He was right. No sooner had we followed—at a little
distance—the last few snakes down the secret entrance than
the doorway of water closed behind us.
It was dark as midnight below the surface of the lake. I held
on to the back of Neel’s shirt as I basically stumbled through
the archway and down the long flight of stairs. As
unpredictable as it made him, I was grateful for his warm
rakkhosh constitution. His back was like a little heater on my
hand, a relief in the cold and clammy cavern under the lake.
“You know, I was ten when I found out what my mother
was,” Neel whispered as we stumbled along, one stair at a
time. “I always knew the other queens didn’t like her, but I
thought they were just jealous because she was the senior rani
and her son would be king.”
“Um … maybe we could exchange life stories later …” I
hissed back. Neel was exhibiting a less-than-ideal sense of
timing. We were climbing down a magical under-a-lake
staircase into a kingdom filled with killer snakes. This really
wasn’t the time for a heart-to-heart chat about our childhoods.
 But Neel just kept rambling. “When it came out that she
was a rakkhoshi in disguise, they wanted to exile both of us, or
maybe kill us.”
The dank underwater air, not to mention my own
overwhelming sense of doom, was making me shiver, and I
wondered if all this gabbing was Neel’s way of dealing with
his own nervousness.
“Okay,” I hissed as we kept climbing down. “I’ll bite. I’m
guessing, since you’re here now and we all know your mom’s
alive and kicking, that your father stopped people from killing
you?”
“Yeah, but he threw her out of the palace and made Lal
crown prince instead of me.”
Ah, so that’s how it happened, I thought, my eyes just
barely adjusting to the darkness. The Raja had unfairly
discriminated against Neel because of who his mother was. I
felt a new sense of sympathy for the half-demon prince. His
family life was a lot more complicated than I knew.
“So I guess after that, your mom got angry and ate
everything in sight?”
“Basically.” We were nearing the bottom of the stairs. “The
thing was, she’d promised herself she would live a human life
when she fell in love with my father.”
“And she felt betrayed, after all that sacrifice.”
“I had to banish her from our lives, otherwise my father
would have found a way to kill her for sure.”
When you got right down to it, the Rakkhoshi Queen
hadn’t been treated very fairly. Not that it was an excuse for
eating people, but it was an explanation.
 As we got to the bottom of the stairs, the darkness grew
steadily lighter—from black to gray and then ash. There was a
light coming from somewhere ahead of us. As we went down
the last step onto the muddy floor of the cavern, the light grew
even brighter.
“There it is!” Neel whispered.
I looked where he was pointing. Wow. The light in the
cavern was coming from a huge jewel in the middle of the
otherwise empty room.
“It must be the python jewel.” I stepped forward. “It’s
beautiful.”
“Just grab it, Princess, and let’s get out of here,” Tuntuni
said, his claws digging painfully into my shoulder.
“Why is nobody guarding it?” Neel pulled me back behind
him into the shadows. “Wait, something’s not right.”
We stood a couple of minutes in a dim corner below the
staircase. Neel was directly in front of me, so I didn’t see what
he did, but I did hear his intake of breath.
“What?”
“Well,” Neel whispered back, “there’s good news and bad
news.”
“Good first.”
“Good news is—that probably is a python jewel, so it’ll
work to read the map.”
“And the bad?”
“Bad news—it’s being guarded by the most humongous
python I’ve ever seen.”
I peeked from behind his broad back and had to stifle a
yelp. Tuntuni dug his nails in harder. I couldn’t blame him.
 Just as Neel had said, a gargantuan python was prowling
the room, slithering in broad circles around the stone. It was so
big, it made that rakkhosh from my front lawn look like an
overgrown garden gnome.
My fingers and feet felt like ice. The cold of the cave had
seeped into my bones, making me shiver from the inside out.
Saving my parents, Lal, and Mati depended on us getting to
the Mountains of Illusions. And us getting to the Mountains of
Illusions depended on us being able to read the moving map.
And us being able to read the moving map

depended on us getting that stupid python jewel—and

somehow getting by that huge snake. But there was no way we
could possibly do that and still be alive.
 My stomach clenched and my teeth started to rattle so
much I was afraid the snake might hear them. I was having
trouble getting in enough air and started seeing black spots in
front of my eyes.
“Breathe, Kiran.” Neel turned around, placing a warm hand
on my shoulder. “You’ve got to keep it together. We need that
jewel. Our families are counting on us.”
His words melted a bit of the brain freeze that was
paralyzing me.
“How are we going to get it without that thing noticing?” It
seemed impossible.
“It’s impossible!” The talking bird was totally histrionic.
“Impossible, I tell you!”
“We’ll let the python notice, that’s how we get the jewel.”
Bringing his lips to my ear, Neel whispered his completely
insane idea. I realized that it just might work. Problem was, if
it didn’t, we’d all be snake chow.
“Are you sure?” I asked again, trying to keep my teeth
from rattling.
“It’s the only way I can think of,” Neel muttered. “Believe
me, if I could think of a better plan, I would have suggested
it.”
“We’re all going to die, we’re all going to die,” Tuntuni
mumbled, a yellow wing over his eye.
“Shut up, Tuni. Just stick to the plan.” Neel grabbed the
bird and plunked him on his shoulder.
With a crooked smile he said, “Just don’t screw up, okay,
Kiran?” And then Neel stepped into the light of the python
jewel.
 It took the serpent a minute to notice him. “Hey, snaky!”
Neel waved his arms, distracting the snake away from me, and
away from the jewel as well.
Then Tuntuni, who was now flying around in high circles
near the ceiling, started singing a childish snake-charming
song:
“Baburam Sapure
Where do you go, Bapure?
Come on, Baba, come and see
Snakes for you and snakes for me.”
As Neel had planned, the python hissed and turned away
from the treasure it was protecting. It slithered rapidly toward
Neel. I crept out of my hiding place and toward the jewel. I
was supposed to grab it while Neel distracted the serpent. The
problem was, Neel hadn’t calculated how much faster the
snake would be able to travel over the muddy ground than I
was. As I tried to run toward the jewel, my feet got more stuck
in the cloying silt. No matter how hard I tried to urge myself
forward, the ground didn’t seem to want to let me. Oh, this
was bad. Very bad.
“Come on, snaky, is that the best you can do?” Neel
taunted, even as the python gained ground toward him. “You
need a little snake charmer to teach you a lesson?”
Tuntuni sang:
“These snakes are alive
In your basket they thrive
Bring me one or two
And I’ll beat them black and blue.”
 So far, Operation Distract and Annoy was working, but at
this rate, there was no way that I would make it to the jewel
before the snake reached Neel. In fact, it was on him now, and
even though he fought its parries with his sword, he couldn’t
seem to injure it. Tuntuni carried on singing near the ceiling
but seemed too afraid to help in the fight.
With a hiss, the snake almost knocked Neel over. I
struggled to hurry, but the cavern floor’s muddy surface was
like walking through molasses. My thighs burned from the
strain of fighting to move faster and faster. But I hadn’t
progressed anywhere near where I needed to go. At this point,
I was still closer to Neel and the serpent than the jewel.
Then the snake grabbed a hold of Neel, wrapped itself
around him, and began to squeeze. It was obvious how much
stronger the animal was than the half-demon prince. Neel was
struggling. He had kept a grip on his sword and tried to injure
the python with its slashes, but the snake’s skin was
unbelievably tough. The sword barely made a dent. Tuntuni, to
his credit, made a few haphazard dives down from the roof,
flapping his wings in the snake’s eyes, but he couldn’t break
the python’s concentration now that it had its prey. Neel’s face
got redder as the snake squeezed.
“Princess, do something, the slacker’s gonna die!” Tuntuni
shrieked.
Save him!” Tuni yelled. “How am I gonna break it to the Raja
if the prince croaks?”
Neel’s plan was based on the fact that pythons aren’t
poisonous; they squeeze their prey to death. And he’d figured,
as a half demon, he should be able to withstand a little
squeezing until I nabbed the jewel. Problem was, neither of us
calculated the silt floor.
I struggled to move, but every step was such an effort. Neel
was still wrestling with the enormous serpent. Muscles of steel
or not, how much longer could he stand this monstrous snake?
There was no way I was going to reach the jewel in time.
Okay, that was a really dumb plan. Time for a new one.
In the struggle, the python’s tail flailed around the room. It
landed with a thump right next to the spot where I was
struggling with the cloying ground. I made a split-second
decision. It was now or never.
I jumped with both feet on the python’s tail. Feeling my
weight, the snake lifted up the back of its body, trying to
dislodge me. But I just lay down, and slid down the snake’s
body as if it was a huge Slip’N Slide. It was rough, slimy, and
scaly on my skin but much easier than running through the
muddy quicksand of the cavern floor. I landed with a thump
about midway up the giant serpent’s body, and, trying to
imagine I was doing nothing scarier than riding Snowy, I hung
on for dear life with my thigh muscles. I reached back to my
quiver and chose one of the “special” arrows Neel had made
me prepare before we left his kingdom. He’d shown me how
to attach a long, thin rope made out of a super-strong Thirteen
Rivers material to some of my arrows. At the time, I couldn’t
figure what I’d need them for. But now I was glad for his
forethought.
My fingers were slippery with sweat and I fumbled with
the bow a little. The snake was bucking and writhing
underneath me, and it wasn’t that easy to concentrate.
“Take your time, there, Prin-cess,” Neel gasped from
somewhere within the python’s coils. He was turning an
unbecoming shade of purple.
“Hold on to your pants, cowboy!”
I finally managed to nock the arrow onto my bow. My
stomach churned as I rode the thrashing snake, and I could
only pray there wouldn’t be a repeat of the famous corn-dog
incident. Neel’s life was dependending on my archery skills.
No pressure or anything.
My hand shaking, I shot the arrow straight up above the
snake’s head, into the cavern ceiling. Would the arrowhead be
strong enough to pierce the hard stone? Bingo! It went in,
leaving the rope dangling behind it like a comet’s tail. I didn’t
even have time to test it to see if it would hold my weight. I
just used it like mountain climbing gear to clamber up the rest
of the snake’s slippery body to the top of its head.
“Show-off!” Neel choked out. Even with me climbing all
over its body, the snake hadn’t stopped squeezing.
“Go Princess, go Princess, go-go-go Princess,” Tuntuni
chanted.
“Remind me to thank you for the arrows after I save you!”
I shouted to Neel.
I was straddling the snake’s head now, trying to stab it. But
just as its skin had been too tough for Neel’s sword, my arrows
couldn’t make a dent. I grabbed the dangling rope from the
arrow still stuck in the ceiling and made a quick noose, which
I slipped over the snake’s neck. It held! The snake hissed and
thrashed around. In the process, it actually dropped Neel. He
fell with a thump on the soft earth.
“Go!” I shouted at Neel.
I didn’t even bother to see if he was all right. How long
would one magical rope hold this massive, super-strong
snake? I shot an arrow into another part of the ceiling, making
another noose out of the dangling rope and looping it over the
snake’s head. I kept going like that: shooting an arrow into the
ceiling, grabbing the rope, threading it under the snake’s chin,
and then starting all over again. In this way, I tied the snake
with a halo of ropes each attached by a different arrow to the
stone ceiling.
One huge bonus of all the ropes was that the snake couldn’t
move its head as much. Which was a relief, because I was still
sitting astride its neck and could feel my breakfast in my
throat.
Of course, the respite wasn’t for too long. The snake’s
muscular body bunched and swayed as it tried to free itself, or
at least ditch me onto the floor.
“Snaky’s in a terrible mess!” Tuntuni sang. “Sewn up by a
royal seamstress!”
It was like being on a bucking bronco ride at a cheesy
Western-themed restaurant. The snake bumped up and down,
left to right, trying to shake off the ropes that pinned it to the
cavern ceiling. As it fought, the ropes actually started to give
way.
Oh no.
Pop.
 The snake managed to yank one of my arrows from the
ceiling. The weapon dangled, harmless, from the rope still
around the serpent’s neck.
“Hurry, Neel!” I yelled. “I don’t know how long these
things are gonna hold it!”
Pop. Another arrow gone.
Neel struggled through the mud over to the python jewel.
Being Mr. Demonic Dude, it was a lot easier for him than it
had been for me. But even still, would he make it in time? The
python had just yanked out two of my special arrows from the
ceiling. I felt back to my quiver. I only had one roped arrow
left. Did I want to use it? Would it make a difference? I
threaded it into my bow, aiming at the ceiling.
Pop. Pop. Pop. The snake was almost entirely free of the
confining ropes now.
In the meantime, Neel reached the jewel. Rather than just
picking it up and running, as had been our original plan, he
kicked mud from the cavern floor over the jewel’s shining
surface. As he kept doing that, the room darkened. My heart
started to speed up. I’d found the courage from who knows
where to ride an enchanted snake like it was some kind of
horse, but there was no way I could face doing that in the dark.
If I’d had the energy, I would have yelled at Neel to stop, but it
was all I could do at this point just to hang on to the thrashing
serpent.
In the graying light, I saw Neel bury the hilt of his sword
deep into the mud in front of the jewel, its point facing up.
He shouted, “On my count, do a Tarzan!”
A Tarzan?
“One … two …”
 Right, a Tarzan. Underneath me, the python tore the last
remaining rope out of the ceiling. The ropes and arrows hung
from its neck like some kind of weird necklace, but they
certainly weren’t doing anything more to slow it down.
I shot my last special arrow into the ceiling and hoisted
myself up the rope and off the snake. It took all my remaining
strength. I hung there, thirty feet off the ground, my muscles
trembling.
“Three …” And with that, Neel kicked a clump of mud
over the remaining part of the jewel, dousing its emanating
light.
The cavern was an inky black. The darkness was filled with
the rancid smell of snake—or it might have been the smell of
my own fear. I started to panic, squeezing my eyes shut so
hard I saw stars. But at least it was a familiar darkness, as
opposed to the blackness outside them. Holy serpent poop. My
hands were so sweaty, I was slipping down the rope. For the
zillionth time in the last few days, I was going to plummet to
my death. It seemed like a recurring theme at this point.
Then I heard Neel’s familiar voice cut through the darkness
like a lifeline. “Hey, slimeball, where’s your precious python
jewel?”
The serpent hissed and slithered away from me. I heard it
move down to the other end of the underwater cave.
My grip was slipping, but I desperately hung on. I didn’t
want to die. I wanted to see my parents again. I wanted to hang
out with Zuzu again. I even wanted to argue with Neel again.
Then the cavern was filled with a wailing as the snake,
searching for its jewel, found instead the point of Neel’s
sword. The cries were horrible—high-pitched and almost
human. There was a thrashing sound like a giant drum being
beaten on the ground. But in a few minutes, all was silent.
As quickly as there had been darkness, there was light.
Neel cleaned some of the dirt from the jewel’s surface,
allowing it to shine once more like an unnatural, underground
sun. I’d never been so happy to see.
The python’s giant body lay still, oozing dark blood on the
cavern floor. Trying to reach its jewel, it had instead split itself
in two on Neel’s sword. Neither of us had been strong enough
to harm it, but it was strong enough to kill itself.
I breathed a very long sigh of relief, and slid down my
rope. Unfortunately, it stopped what felt like a bazillion miles
too short of the ground.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake.”
Neel, now holding the muddy python jewel, was standing
under where I hung.
“Let go,” he said.
I shook my head, unable to move.
“Come on,” Neel coaxed. “You’ve got to trust me. Like it
or not, we’re in this together.”
Did I trust Neel? It was hard to say. One moment I felt like
strangling him, the next, one of us was saving the other’s life.
At the very least, until we rescued our families, we were
partners. And I guess that deserved some trust.
“I suppose we half monsters have got to stick together.”
We had a lot in common, Neel and I, even if I didn’t like to
admit it.
I let go. It wasn’t like one of those scenes in a movie,
where the princess floats lightly into the waiting hero’s arms. I
was more like an anvil that comes plummeting down on a
cartoon character’s head. I fell, like a graceful barbell, right on
top of Neel.
Squelch. We both sank even farther into the mud.
“You did ask for it.” I swiped some silt from my face.
“Yeah.” Neel grinned through the dirt. “I guess I did.”
Unfortunately, the muddy moment was shattered by the
sound of a terrible hissing that sent shivers up my spine far
worse than any darkness.
“Welcome home,” seven voices hissed, “Sssissster.”
The seven-headed cobra towered above us, bobbing and
swaying. His scaly green skin shimmered in the light of the
python jewel, which was now knotted into its muscular tail.
Dimmer lights shone from each of seven smaller jewels sitting
on each of its seven heads. As it danced its twisting dance, I
saw reflected, seven times over, the same U-shaped marking
on my upper arm. Like two cruel eyes that had been staring at
me my whole life.
It was terrifying and horrible and a bit fascinating all at the
same time.
When I heard the story of the moon maiden’s seven stolen
sons from “Danavi,” somehow I assumed that my seven
brothers were turned into seven snakes. Now I realized they
were each of seven heads attached to one powerful serpent
body.
The magic snake hissed as I moved right. It flicked out its
seven forked tongues as Neel moved left. With a hissing and a
bumping, it forced us both to walk straight ahead. And in this
way, my brothers escorted us, none too politely, out of the
cavern and into the Serpent King’s throne room.
“A plan,” Neel muttered as we shuffled side by side,
shoved along by the seven-headed snake. “We need a getaway
plan. Like right now.”
“What do we do?”
“I’m thinking. I’m thinking.” Neel’s voice was desperate.
“I don’t suppose you have any good ideas?”
 “If I did, would I be asking you?”
Tuntuni, for once, was unable to speak. He shook like a—
well—like a feather in my arms.
Not that he didn’t have good reasons. After the emptiness
of the jewel cavern, the throne room was a shock. It positively
writhed with snakes. Snakes carpeted the floors, hung from the
ceilings, wrapped around the pillars, and decorated the light
fixtures. Even the enormous throne at the end of the room was
made of writhing, hissing, green, black, yellow, and brown
serpent bodies.
And among all those slithering snakes, hundreds of jewels
of all shapes and sizes. Each serpent seemed to be protecting
one. None were as big as the python jewel that the seven-
headed cobra had taken from us, but the serpents were
hoarding untold riches down here in their underwater
kingdom.
Almost in unison, they all bared their fangs as we entered
the room.
“Frightened, Sssissster?” the cobra’s seven heads hissed as
one. “You shhhould be!”
I’d just come face-to-face for the first time with my
brothers—well, what used to be my brothers anyway. I hadn’t
thought much about them, but assumed that when I saw them,
I would feel some sort of sibling connection. Instead, all I felt
was revulsion. And fear. The cobra didn’t seem to hold too
much brotherly love for me either. With a hiss, it pushed us
again toward the throne.
“Father, ssseee what I have brought you!” I could clearly
hear the eagerness to impress the king in all seven of those
voices.
 We had no choice but to move forward. My seven-headed
band of brothers were baring their fangs right behind us.
But so too were the serpents in front of us. They slithered
forward, hissing, winding themselves around our arms and
legs, hanging over our heads from the ceiling. It was like a
horrible nightmare. At first I tried not to scream as I felt their
cold skin slip across mine—but soon I couldn’t control myself.
Slip—a snake was climbing up my shin. Squeeze—another
wrapped itself across my chest like a purse strap. I couldn’t
even see Neel anymore—my vision was entirely blocked by
writhing serpents. I thought of Baba and how he had tried to
protect me from this. I shut my eyes, trying to imagine myself
a little girl again, safe and secure in my father’s arms.
A familiar voice screamed and screamed. It took me a
couple of moments to realize it was my own.
After what seemed like hours but must have been minutes,
a voice commanded from the end of the room, “Serpents
begone! Make a path, and bring them to me!”
The snakes unwound themselves from our bodies. Even the
ones in front of us wiggled away, making a clear path from
where we stood to the throne.
My skin felt slimy and clammy. I felt shaken and bruised. I
shuddered as the seven-headed snake pushed me forward
again.
“I’m so sorry,” I mumbled brokenly to Neel. He reached
out and held my damp hand in his own. The warmth of his
skin took a small edge off my fear.
“For what?” he breathed.
We walked forward as slowly as we could toward the snake
throne.
 “He’s my dad. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it wasn’t for
me.”
“Not true. We needed to find that python jewel.”
“Well, I’m sorry anyway.”
“It’s not your fault,” Neel muttered. “He’s your dark
matter.”
“My what?” I asked, but we were in front of the throne by
then and the Serpent King’s green eyes flashed.
“Silence!” he bellowed. I dropped Neel’s hand. Tuni
cowered on my shoulder somewhere near my ear.
“I see you have met my son Naga,” the Serpent King
hissed. “I am Sesha, King of the Serpents, guardian of the
primordial ocean of divine nectar, keeper of time.”
My skin broke out in goose bumps. My mouth felt dry. This
was my biological father, at last. The Serpent King had a
human form: dark hair tinged with gray, shimmering green
clothes, a crown made of serpent’s teeth, a handsome but cruel
face. Was there any similarity there to mine? I searched but
couldn’t see it.
“Welcome to the Palace of Desires,” the Serpent King
hissed. Beside his writhing throne of snakes were urns of
rubies, emeralds, and diamonds. He ran his hands through
these as he talked, letting the jewels fall back through his
fingers. “Do you see anything that pleases you?”
His green eyes glowed in my direction, and I could feel
their almost physical pull. Here he was, not five feet away. My
father. And he wanted me back; he wanted me to join him.
What was wrong with that? That was only natural, wasn’t it? I
had a swimming, goofy sensation, like I was filled with the
golden honey that Mati had been feeding the pakkhiraj horses.
I felt the nectar swimming through my blood. My father
wanted me back. And I would go.
I swayed, my eyes half hooded, as if in a trance.
Until I felt a sharp peck on my neck, that is.
“Princess, don’t look directly at him. Still your mind. Don’t
believe the sweet lies he’s feeding you,” Tuntuni squawked.
“Silence!” the Serpent King snarled, waking me out of my
trancelike state. I stared at the floor, my mind racing. I could
still feel my father’s pull, though. Was it magic, something
about his personality, or just our shared history? I couldn’t tell
but I couldn’t trust myself to resist him either.
“If she is the one, it is fate that has brought her back to
me.” I could feel more than see the Serpent King’s green eyes
were boring into me. “She will be a valuable weapon in the
coming war.”
“Yesss, Father,” Naga agreed in his multiple voices.
My heart was a mess of contradictions. I was afraid. I
didn’t want to be turned into a snake, or a weapon, or to stay
in this underground reptile zoo for a minute longer. On the
other hand, it was hard not to feel the power of finding my
birth father. Then, like a wave, the guilt washed over me. How
could I be thinking of this monster as my father when my own
dear Baba was still missing?
“She has my mark on her arm,” the Serpent King hissed,
“but what makes you so sure she is the one?”
“Shhhe bearsss this mark alssso, Father!” The seven-
headed serpent pushed me to my knees.
“Hey!” Neel protested.
The cobra’s tail pushed my head down, revealing the
moon-shaped scar on the back of my neck. The Serpent King’s
laugh boomed through the cavern.
“So, it’s true. You are the brat my queen hid away. And
now you’ve come back—to steal from your poor old father?”
His voice was mocking. I was pretty sure Sesha didn’t think he
was either poor or old.
Neel helped me to my feet. My legs were like jelly.
“I am Kiranmala.” I held my head up, hoping the trembling
in my lips wasn’t too obvious.
For a second, I thought the Serpent King smiled. But his
expression remained cruel.
“And who are you, young rakkhosh?” he asked. “What do
you want with my”—he paused—“filthy little offspring?”
“I’m, er, friends with your, erm, daughter. Uh, sir,” Neel
stammered, sounding more like he was addressing a friend’s
dad at after-school carpool than a mortal enemy. Maybe he
was feeling the Serpent King’s strange power too.
“Silence!” Sesha shouted. “This puny imp is my blood? I
can hardly believe it.” He sneered, his upper lip curling in an
ugly way.
I was rooted to the spot. This was way more awful than I
thought it would be. How could I ever have thought I might
have anything in common with such a horrible father?
“Just like your mother,” he continued, “so soft and weak
and moony.”
My throat constricted, but I pushed down the tears. Part of
me refused to blubber in front of this monster. But truth be
told, another part of me didn’t want to disappoint my father.
“You will thank me.” The Serpent King raised his arms
above his head. “You will thank me for sparing you from a life
of drudgery and giving birth to your inner glory!”
 I hid my eyes. I could feel his green gaze boring into me
again, and that pull, like some kind of a magical rope between
us. Like he had shot me with an invisible arrow attached to a
string and all he had to do was reel me in.
“Join me!” the King thundered, a blinding green light
building between his hands.
“No!” Neel shouted, as if forcing himself to resist Sesha’s
magic. “I kind of like her the way she is.” He pulled out his
sword, which flashed in the light of the Serpent King’s
glowing energy.
But Naga pushed Neel to the ground, looming and hissing
above him.
“Stop!” I cried, reaching for my bow.
None of us noticed that Tuntuni had flown out of my arms
while the King talked. Now he flew up, flapped his wings in
Sesha’s face, and then snatched something out of Neel’s shirt
pocket.
It was the shadow seller’s purple vial with the cork top.
“Tuntuni, wait …” Neel began. But with one swift gesture,
the bird smashed the vial to bits at the feet of the Snake King.
There was a tinkling of broken glass, but beyond that, nothing
happened.
We all stared at the broken bottle like participants in a
strange wax-museum tableau. The king, the bird, the prodigal
daughter, the looming serpent, and his princely prey.
Sesha was the first to break out of the expectant trance.
“Ha!” The Serpent King’s moustache twitched as he
laughed. “I haven’t been that amused in a long time!”
But then a thick gray smoke swirled out of the shattered
glass. It wrapped itself like a never-ending sari around the
throne room, circling the pillars, weaving through the
furniture, threading its wispy form above and below the
throne. It wrapped us, the snakes, everything in its expanding
folds.
“Hang on, y’all, here it comes!” Tuntuni chirped.
“Here what comes?” I eyed the growing mist.
“Just don’t let go!” Neel grabbed me with one hand, the
bird with his other.
An earthquake-like rumbling shook the teeth in my head.
The snakes hissed and slithered around in panic. Then
enormous roots shot out of every nook and cranny of the
throne room, breaking right through the snake pillars and
snake chandeliers, the snake tables and snake throne chair.
From the roots, a sturdy trunk exploded like a rocket toward
the sky.
“Father! The sssky isss falling!” Naga shrieked.
And it was. The banyan tree shadow, which had been
trapped inside the purple bottle, was reconstituting itself now
that it was free—like a dry sponge exposed to water. The
mighty branches shot up and out, crashing through any
obstacle before them. Pieces of stone ceiling plummeted down
like giant pieces of hail, crushing snakes.
“This isn’t the last time you’ll see me!” The Serpent King
waved his arms, and in a flash of green, he transformed
himself into a hideous serpent with a hundred heads. His
endlessly coiled tail vibrated with a primordial power.
Already, the banyan tree was destroying the room. Now, with
every rattle of his mystical tail, the entire cavern shook and
spun. Cracks shot along the walls and floors. A huge one
beneath the throne opened up, and the Serpent King and Naga
disappeared through it.
 Neel pulled at my arm. “Wait!” I shouted, breaking free of
his grasp.
In the chaos, the seven-headed serpent had left the python
jewel. I grabbed it, tucking it inside Neel’s jacket, which I was
still wearing.
Neel took my hand again in his steely grip and pulled me
toward his body. “Hold on!” he ordered, and I wrapped one
arm around his shoulder, holding Tuntuni with the other. Neel
lunged, grabbing one of the branches that shot its way toward
the sky.
“Wait a minute!” We were flying straight toward the stone
ceiling, chaos and destruction all around us. Oh, I had a bad
feeling about this. “Aren’t we right under the …”
“When I say so, you both take a big breath!” Neel
commanded. “One … two …”
But he didn’t even have a chance to count to three, because
the tree trunk charged a huge hole in the ceiling of the
underground cavern, and lake water poured into the room,
drowning the snakes. And, oh yeah, us.
We were underwater. I panicked in the swirling tempest and
tried to kick away from Neel with my legs, toward what I
guessed was the surface of the lake. But Neel held on to me. I
fought him, panicking. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even see
which way was up. My lungs were going to explode.
Air.
Oh, I needed air.
I shook my head. The pressure on my lungs was too much. I
was going to drown. I didn’t want to die like this. I had to get
air … had … to … get …
With a burst, the tree branch Neel was hanging on to
cleared the surface of the water. I gasped big breaths into my
lungs.
I breathed.
I breathed.
I breathed.
The air tasted so sweet. I would never take the simple act of
breathing for granted again.
The tree deposited us on the shore, its branch acting like an
enormous hand. As soon as we tumbled off, the branches kept
shooting upward and outward. The banyan’s roots stretched
and grew until the entire surface of the lake was gone. And
with it, the underworld kingdom was buried without a
doorway to the upper realm. Where the lake had been, with its
magic door, was now a majestic banyan tree.
Neel and I lay side by side near the tree’s roots, panting.
“We’re alive!” Neel’s eyes glowed in a way that made me
feel a little dizzy.
“You don’t need to sound so surprised.” I groaned, trying to
sit up. My entire body ached like I’d been through some giant
car wash. Except without a car. I felt all vomit-y again.
 “Dark energy!” Neel stretched his arms, cracked his neck,
and then began wringing out his shirt. “Dang, that’s some
powerful stuff in Chhaya Devi’s shadows.”
“Dark what?” My breath was still jagged and hurt my raw
throat. My hair was plastered to me, but I couldn’t find the
strength to brush it from my eyes.
I couldn’t help but resent Neel, who looked almost chipper
now. There was something really annoying about a boy who
never seemed tired, even after fighting a passel of poisonous
snakes, then getting half drowned.
“Dark energy. It’s the energy that helps the universe keep
expanding. You might call it a part of the universal life force.”
That sounded vaguely familiar.
“My Baba always tells me we’re all connected by energy—
trees, wind, animals, people, everything.” I tried to get my
ragged breathing under control. “He says that life energy is a
kind of river flowing through the universe.”
“And that our souls are just a bit of that river water held
inside the clay pitcher of our bodies?” Neel smiled at my
surprise. “Yeah, I know that story too. They say that when our
bodies give out, that’s just the pitcher breaking, pouring what’s
inside back into the original stream of universal souls.”
“So no one’s soul is ever really gone,” I finished, repeating
the words that Baba had said to me so often.
“Yup.” Neel nodded. “It’s the same idea that governs
Chhaya Devi’s shadows. When unleashed, there’s nothing
more powerful than the desire of nature to reunite with the
universal soul.”
I was about to ask Neel to explain some more, when I
noticed the still, yellow body a couple of feet away.
 “Tuntuni!”
The little bird wasn’t moving at all. His wings were dark
with water, and his head and beak were at a funny angle. Panic
sent energy shooting through my cramped muscles. I half
crawled, half scrambled over to where his tiny form lay on the
ground.
I shook him, calling his name. The poor thing just flopped
in my hands. I tried looking for a pulse (did birds have
pulses?) but couldn’t find one. My own heart fluttered
alarmingly in panic. Where was a phone to dial 911 when I
needed it! I started to do CPR, pumping his little yellow chest
with two fingers. Problem was, the only CPR I’d ever learned
was from a hospital TV show.
“He might be gone, Kiran,” Neel murmured. He touched
the bird’s feathery head. “Returned to the universal stream of
souls.”
“I won’t let him die! He saved our lives!” I wailed, but then
I noticed Tuni’s chest was moving—although very slightly—
on its own. I didn’t know what else to do except to cradle him
in my lap, stroking his feathery head. His breathing was
uneven, now rapid, now stopped entirely. He made a strange
choking sound, and then the movement in his chest slowed
down even further.
“Kiran,” Neel said, but I ignored him, rocking and cooing
to the bird in my arms.
Within a few seconds, I realized that Tuntuni’s breathing
had stopped altogether.
No, no, no.
“Kiran,” Neel said again. This time he put a gentle hand on
my shoulder.
“He can’t die!” I cried. “He can’t!”
 Everything crashed in on me. Being away from home.
Inviting Neel’s mom into the kingdom. Fighting that awful
snake in the dark. Coming face-to-face with my über-awful
birth brothers and father. The ticking clock on my real parents’
lives. My chest burned until I thought I would explode. And
then it happened.
I started to cry. Not just cry, but sob, complete with pathetic
bleating noises. My eyes stung, my throat caught. And that
doorway in my chest that I’d kept tightly shut for so long burst
open, releasing everything that I’d stuffed inside. Salty tears
poured down my face, mingling with the lake water on the
bird’s body.
But Neel didn’t laugh or point or even say useless
platitudes about how the bird had lived a full life. How
everything would be okay. He just sat there in my presence,
letting me be sad. He just was.
And then the most remarkable thing happened. The stone-
still bird took a shuddering breath. He stirred, and grew warm
in my arms. I watched, stunned, as Tuntuni opened his eyes.
“What should you buy a bird?” he chirped weakly.
“He’s alive!”
“Looks like it.” Neel looked at me with a curious
expression. “He’s alive.”
Tuni coughed and sputtered, shaking his soaked wings dry.
“Something cheep!”
I laughed in relief. If Tuni was telling bad jokes, he was
going to be okay. I hugged the bird to me until he started to
protest, and I put him down.
“Let’s get out of here, numskulls!” Tuni croaked weakly.
“Before those snakes figure out how to come back!”
 “We can’t.” I looked around wildly. “I don’t know where
the horses are!”
“You still have the python jewel, right?” Neel asked.
It took me a couple moments because my fingers were still
numb. Neel helped me struggle out of his sopping jacket, and
finally we pulled out the python jewel from the pocket. The
light from the magic stone illuminated the dark forest.
I heard the flapping of large wings. Like some kind of a
beacon, the jewel had called the horses from wherever they’d
been hiding. Snowy and Midnight trod their way through the
banyan tree roots, neighing and tossing their manes.
“You couldn’t just have told me to take out the jewel
sooner?” I said as Snowy snarfled my ear with a wet nose.
“There’s fresh clothes in the saddlebags!”
“I’m sorry; I was a bit preoccupied watching you heal
Tuntuni.”
“I didn’t heal him!” Where did Neel get that idea? “He just
got better on his own.”
“If you say so.”
“I do.” I scuttled off, shaking with wet and cold, to go
change behind a distant tree.
After I was in dry clothes, I felt almost myself again. I
pulled out Ma’s map. In the light of the python jewel, we had
no trouble reading it. The decoding trick was actually easy.
You just had to shine the jewel at the paper, then put your eye
up to the back of it, so you were viewing the map through the
prisms of the python jewel’s surface. Just like that, the blank
sheet was covered with the recognizable symbols on a map.
“Look, some kind of body of water—a sea—separates us
from the Maya Mountains.”
 I stared at the paper. The writing on it was actually moving.
Where, just a second ago, had been the lake entrance to the
underworld kingdom was now the drawing of a huge tree.
And, if I wasn’t mistaken, there were also two little human
figures and a bird next to two creatures that looked like
winged horses.
Neel was unfazed. “You are here,” he said, pointing at the
shorter of the two human figures. “And the sea we have to
cross is”—he dragged his finger not a long distance on the
map—“here.”
“And then over the sea to the Maya Mountains, easy!” I
slung my quiver on my back.
“As long as the mountains don’t move again before we can
get there,” Tuntuni mumbled. “Or if we don’t get eaten by sea
monsters. Or catch our deaths of pneumonia …”
“Your secret’s out, Tuni.” I picked up the bird and put him
on my shoulder. “You’re not as much of a grump as you
pretend to be.”
“Oh, yes, I am!” squawked the bird. But he puffed out his
feathers in pleasure.
Neel rolled his eyes at the both of us as he tugged on
Midnight’s reigns. “Come on, boy, let’s go!”
We were on our way to the Ruby Red Sea, when something
else Neel said in the Serpent King’s throne room came back to
me. We rode side by side, but I still had to shout a little to
make myself heard over the wind.
“Hey, Neel, what was that other thing you said about my …
I mean, the Serpent King? You said he was my dark matter? Is
that the same thing as dark energy?”
“Nah, dark matter’s a whole other mysterious force.” Neel
clicked his tongue at Midnight, who kept straining at the bit,
trying to gallop faster. “In your dimension, dark matter’s the
invisible presence that surrounds galaxies. Your scientists
can’t see it, except sometimes like a halo around star systems.”
“And that relates to the Serpent King how?”
“Dark matter has this incredible gravitational pull,” Neel
explained. “It wants to incorporate everything into itself.
Think about how badly the Serpent King wanted to draw
everything into himself. Your brother-snakes. You.”
“There is no light without the darkness,” Tuntuni chirped
from my shoulder. “No darkness without the light.”
It was the same thing the merchant of shadows had said to
Neel. She’d also said that Neel had to face his shadow self but
not get pulled into the darkness. I guessed the same was true
for me. My biological parents had been invisible my whole life
—but hovering around me like a dark halo even as Ma and
Baba filled my life with light. And now that dark pull had
brought me back to this place, threatening to extinguish my
parents’ light forever.
I couldn’t ask anything else because we had already gotten
to the edge of the sea. As we landed and dismounted the
horses, I noticed there was a long line of colorful barges on the
shore of the lapping water, carved and painted to look like
peacocks. Neel pulled the barge closest to us in more securely
onto the land.
“Can’t the horses just fly us over?”
Neel shook his head, pointing to a sign that read:
PFDBMHNFZ
Then in smaller letters under it:
Pakkhiraj, Flying Demons, Bird Man, and Helicocroc No-
Fly Zone
“Another no-fly zone, huh?” I remembered the Mandhara
Mountain.
Neel nodded. “Any land mass that tends to move is a no-fly
zone. There’ve been cases of flying horses getting trapped in
the space between here and there if they’re flying when the
land under them decides to shift around.”
“And I guess I don’t really want to know what a Helicocroc
is, huh?”
Tuntuni shuddered. “Just be glad, Princess, they can’t fly
here.”
Neel heaved the golden and silver spheres out of
Midnight’s saddlebags and into the barge, while I packed what
food and supplies we had left into my backpack. As we
worked, I picked up the conversation from before.
“I don’t get it, Neel. Is the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans
and Thirteen Rivers some kind of version of outer space? Back
in the stables, I think I saw something really weird in your
mother’s mouth …”
“Like planets and moons and stuff?” His smile was twisted
and didn’t really reach his eyes. “Like I said before, it’s all
really complicated to explain. That’s why we call people from
your dimension 2-Ds. Most people from there can’t imagine
that there are a lot of realities that exist at the same time. That
one thing can have multiple forms. That the difference
between inner space and outer space might just be an illusion.”
I remembered a Shady Sadie the Science Lady show about
how our reality might just be one of many, and that these
parallel dimensions might be like a bunch of vibrating strings
in a row—each dimension clueless about the existence of the
others. But even though I’d heard about it before, it was still
really hard to imagine. Just trying to think about it hurt my
brain.
But then something else struck me. “So if we don’t get to
my parents in time”—I gulped—“they really will get
swallowed into a black hole?”
“You could say that. Every time a spell collapses, it gives
birth to a new rakkhosh from a well of dark energy. The
amount of time that takes varies—usually rakkhosh are born
the night of a new moon. And when they’re born …” Neel
trailed off. “Well, let’s just say, they’re hungry.”
“So what are we waiting for? Let’s go!”
Before I got into the peacock barge, I hugged Snowy’s
muzzle.
“I’ll miss you, Tushar Kona,” I murmured, using his real
name.
And then, as clearly as if the horse were speaking to me, I
heard his voice in my mind.
 Don’t get killed, Princess. I really like you.
“Okay, I’ll try not to get killed,” I whispered, tickling
Snowy’s ears.
“Are you talking to your horse?” Tuntuni made a cuckoo
gesture with his wing, drawing circles at the side of his head.
“Isn’t that a little wacka wacka?”
“Look who’s talkin’,” muttered Neel.
And with that, we pushed offshore in our peacock barge,
waving good-bye to our loyal horses.
The full, red moon hung high in the sky, beaming down on
us with an eerie light. The tides were on our side, propelling
the little boat forward on the water. We didn’t have to row, but
Neel steered us straight with the wooden rudder. To balance
out the long barge, I sat at the far front end, with the golden
and silver spheres in the middle. Tuntuni plunked himself in
my lap and fell asleep.
As we floated along, something strange began to happen.
Just like I could hear Snowy’s thoughts in my mind, I felt a
buzzing all around me, as if something—the sky, the sea, the
very air—were speaking to me.
No, it’s the moon.
“Did you say something, Neel?”
“Hmm?” he called from the back of the boat.
Look at the water to see my reflection, Daughter.
The dark red moon was enormous in the mirrorlike surface
of the sea.
“Mother?” I whispered, barely believing it.
I have been a poor mother to you, my little piece of the
moon …
 The voice sounded so sad. Did she know what we’d just
been through?
“The underworld kingdom,” I started. “We buried the lake
…”
He will rise again, I fear, the moon replied. Until then,
Daughter, you have freed me of my obligation. And this month
on the night of no moon, when I come down to Earth in my
human form, I can visit you.
My birth mother could come down to Earth on the night of
the new moon! It couldn’t be a coincidence that was the same
amount of time I had to find my parents before they became
baby-demon food.
The sea wind whipped my hair and the salt water stung my
cheeks. I looked back at Neel, who was staring ahead, steering
the boat into the dark water. My eyes fell on the surface of the
sea, and I started. Was I seeing what I thought I was seeing?
The moon shone even more brightly than before, making
the surface of the water shimmer as if made of bobbing red
rubies. Tentatively, I ran my fingers in the sea. Then I scooped
my hand back into the boat.
Clunk, clink, thunk.
I didn’t leave your father’s kingdom entirely empty-handed,
Daughter. These are your birthright.
I scooped my hand along the sea again.
“What was that?” Neel called.
I didn’t know what to say. At my feet glimmered dozens of
bloodred rubies I’d just plucked from the water’s surface.
Wordlessly, I held up one of the stones. The night was dark,
but in the glow of the python jewel, the ruby shimmered.
“Where did you get that?”
 I pointed at the sea. With a grin, Neel started scooping in
fistfuls of rubies himself.
At the sound of all the clunking, Tuni woke up.
“Cross ruby seas full of love beneath the dark red moon,”
he recited.
I slid the smooth jewels through my fingers. “Thank you,” I
whispered, “Mother.”
You’re welcome, Daughter. I’m afraid you’ll need them in
the terrible place you’re going.
“We’re not going straight to Maya Pahar?” I felt a pit of
dread growing in my stomach.
Check the map, the moon said before disappearing behind a
gray cloud.
In the back of the boat, Neel whooped as he scooped up
more and more rubies.
“Watch it,” I called. The boat sunk pretty close to the
surface of the water. “We’re heavy enough as it is.”
I took Ma’s map from my pocket, and peered at it in the
python jewel’s light.
“Oh no … the thing’s shape-shifting again.”
“Look, we’re approaching shore!” Neel pointed to a vague
gray line on the horizon.
“Neel,” I warned, “according to the map, that’s not the
Maya Mountains anymore.”
The lines on the paper finally stopped moving. The little
bird peeked over my shoulder. “Okay, now the Maya
Mountains are on the other side of …” Tuni stopped. He made
a choking noise, and discharged several yellow tail feathers.
“What?” Neel asked.
 “That shoreline in front of us is definitely not the Maya
Mountains.” My stomach was in knots.
“What is it, then?”
I turned around to face him, my eyes wide. “It’s Demon
Land!”
We pulled the boat onshore as quietly as we could, hiding it
beneath some dried palm fronds. Neel made a sort of sling
with the silk scarf around his waist, and tucked the golden and
silver spheres into it. If the whole situation weren’t so dire, I
would have made a joke about his bowling ball babies.
Instead, I slung my backpack, bow, and quiver onto my
shoulders in silence. We both stuffed our pockets and packs
full of the rubies we’d gathered from the sea. We didn’t speak
once, except in looks and gestures. This was bad. Really,
really bad.
I tucked the python jewel inside Neel’s jacket, which I was
still wearing, so there was only the light from the stars to guide
our way. The moon seemed to have disappeared permanently
behind the clouds. I couldn’t blame her. She probably didn’t
want to watch her daughter get eaten by a horde of hungry
rakkhosh.
The thin strip of beach was empty, except for piles of
rotting animal carcasses. I wondered if some of those skeletal
remains might actually be human. Beyond the beach, there
was evidence of wanton destruction everywhere. Trees pulled
out by their roots, burned remains of wood and paper, candy
wrappers, gigantic balls of chewed gum, empty soda cans—
many of them half-eaten with teeth marks all over them. The
trees hung heavy with goopy body fluids—snot or spit or
boogers, I couldn’t tell, but their rancid odor made my eyes
water.
“Hygiene is clearly not a priority here!” Tuntuni sputtered.
 We crept as quickly as we could through the woods at the
edge of the shore. There was the long-dead corpse of a vulture
hanging from one of the trees. I shuddered, swatting away a
sticky string hanging from a branch.
I saw the remains of a lawn mower that someone had tried
to snack on. And what was that other thing behind the rock? A
front-loading washing machine with a gigantic bite out of its
side?
“Some gourmet tastes your relatives have,” I said before I
could stop myself. Nice going, Kiran.
Neel didn’t answer, but even in the darkness I could tell he
was scowling. “Look, they’ll all eat me as easily as they’ll eat
you.”
“Except for your fangirls, of course.” I tried for a lighter
tone, but Neel didn’t look like he was in the mood to laugh.
To our left, something was crashing through the forest. We
all froze. A raucous, bawdy, and yet horrifying singing filled
the bitter air.
“Hob, gum, goom, geer! Pass the blood! Pass the beer!
Hob, goom, gum, geet! We want to feast on human
meat!”
The noise came from a little too nearby—just beyond a
clump of palm trees.
“Run!” Neel yanked me behind him as he dashed through
the trees. I kept up as much as I could. My arms got scratched
by hanging branches, and my feet bruised by roots sticking out
of the ground, but I ran like my life depended on it. Which,
basically, it did.
“Princess, help!” Tuntuni called from behind me.
 I ran back. The bird had flown straight into a net of demon
goo as thick as a spider’s web. I tried to untangle his wings,
but couldn’t.
“Neel!” I screamed.
The prince came running, and together we struggled to
pluck the little bird out of the gloppy mess.
“We don’t have time for this!” Neel drew his sword.
“What are you doing?” For a second, I panicked. He
wouldn’t hurt the bird, would he?
“Getting us out of here!” Neel cried. He sliced Tuni out of
the goo and thrust the tangled bird into my arms. “Let’s go!”
“Oh, my beautiful feathers! Oh, the horror! The stench!”
the sticky bird wailed in my arms. But I kept running. The
band of drunken demons was getting ever closer. And they had
a serious case of the munchies.
“Gob gaam! Khom khoo!
We want some human stew!”
“There!” I pointed.
We’d entered a clearing. An old deserted cabin stood in its
center. The door of the cabin was kind of rickety, but the walls
seemed strong enough.
We dashed into the dark building just in time. With a
thrashing of bush and tree, the demons came into the clearing
themselves.
“Thakata-thakata-dang-dang-dort!
We love hunting meaty sport!”
I helped Neel prop the cabin’s broken table, chairs, and a
cabinet against the front door. Unfortunately, there was still a
small opening in the frame where the hinge had come off.
 “We’re in luck.” He peeked through the opening into the
moonlit clearing. “They’re khokkosh.”
“What’s that?” As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I tried
to shake the remaining strands of demon goop off of poor
Tuntuni, who still looked shell-shocked.
“You remember how bright the rakkhosh we met in New
Jersey was?”
“He was an idiot. He tried to eat my toaster.”
“Yeah, well, these khokkosh make that guy look like Albert
Einstein.” Neel’s face was grim. “One of the few 2-D geniuses
who recognized the multiplicity of dimensions.”
Okay, what? But there wasn’t time now to ask Neel about
that. I watched as he ran around the small cabin, grabbing the
oil lamps that were littered here and there.
“If they’re so dumb, then why do you still look so
worried?”
“They may be stupid,” he muttered as he lit each lamp, “but
they’re strong. And obviously, hungry.”
I took a peek through the door opening myself. Yipes. The
clearing was thick with the ferocious khokkosh. They were
smaller than rakkhosh, and more animal-like. They had yellow
skin, crooked teeth, and pointy ears that made them look like a
cross between giant rabbits and enormous bats. Their claws
seemed plenty sharp, and their long, skinny arms were twisted
with stringy muscles.
“Don’t say anything,” Neel whispered. “Just do what I do.”
I nodded.
 Tuni let out a low, soap-opera-style wail. “Oh, the
humanity! The humanity, I say! We’re all going to die, we’re
all going to die,” the yellow bird cried, falling to the floor with
a wing perched dramatically over his head.
Neel and I stood still, our every muscle tensed. My
straining ears could even make out the snuffling and shuffling
as someone, or something, walked toward the house.
It was all I could do not to jump when a horrible, nasal
voice called from just outside the door. “Hub, hum, hai,
hower! Who’s awake at this dark hour?”
“We are hungry rakkhosh!” Neel growled.
At that the khokkosh retreated from the door. We could
hear them whispering to one another from a few feet away.
“Huum-humm hoam! Let’s plunder and roam!” said one
group.
 “Gumm-guum gaam! Let’s go home!” said another.
But they didn’t leave. The khokkosh gathered away from
the door to engage in some more whispering and negotiating.
One, who I assumed was their spokes-demon, a stupid-looking
guy with a scar over his eye and a half-chewed-off ear, walked
up to the cabin again.
“Goom-goom, doom-dite! If you’re really rakkhosh, turn
off the light!”
“No we won’t!” Neel held the lamps high even closer to the
door and gestured to me to do the same.
At my raised eyebrows, he hissed, “Everyone knows
khokkosh can’t see in the light!”
“I’m sooo sorry!” I whisper-yelled. “I must have missed
that lecture in demonology class!”
There was some more murmuring from outside as the
demons consulted one another to figure out their next move.
“Shoom-shaam, hoom-hails! If you’re really rakkhosh,
show us your nails!”
Neel put down the lamps and picked up a bunch of arrows
from my quiver. He shoved the points through the opening.
Tuntuni handed me a few arrows with his beak, and when I
stuck them through the hole, I was gratified to hear the spokes-
demon yelp.
“Oh, my mother’s sainted fart! This demon’s nails really
smart!”
There was more mumbling from outside, and even the
sound of a fistfight. Someone seemed to be biting someone
else. The spokes-demon approached the cabin again, this time
with an even stupider-looking fellow with a wart the size of a
watermelon growing out of his forehead.
 “Dum-doom, ding-dung! If you’re really rakkhosh, show us
your tongue!”
With only a second of hesitation, Neel thrust the blade of
his sword through the opening, making both the spokes-demon
and his assistant screech.
“Oh, my uncle’s rotten guts! That rakkhosh’s tongue really
cuts!”
This time, a whole troop came up to the doorway. “Gob-
goob, flim-flit! If you’re really rakkhosh, let’s see your spit!”
They chanted in one voice.
“What do we do now?” I moaned.
Neel looked desperately around, mumbling, “Spit, spit.”
The khokkosh outside the door began shrieking and
howling. “Let’s see your spit! Let’s see your spit!”
A few of the bolder ones began banging and scratching on
the door. A few more seconds and they just might realize we
were lying, and decide to bash the door down.
“Anytime now, Neel!” I’m not ashamed to say I was kinda
freaking out.
The noise outside was getting louder and louder, and the
wood of the door was starting to splinter from the force of the
demons’ blows. What were we going to do? Neel was still
dashing around the hut, looking for something that could
substitute for rakkhosh spit. I looked desperately around too,
and then my eyes alighted on the oil lamps.
“Neel!” I pointed. As he figured out what I meant, he
started to grin.
I mouthed the words, “On three,” and he nodded. On my
count, we picked up the lamps and spattered all the hot oil
through the opening. The khokkosh howled, dousing the spots
where the oil had burned them with their tails.
“Oh, my grandpa’s nose rings! That rakkhosh spit really
stings!”
This seemed to be the last straw for the khokkosh, who
didn’t even consult one another before running out of the
clearing.
“Gob-gum! Dum-dack! There’s rakkhosh here, let’s go
back!”
As the monsters ran pell-mell out of the clearing, we all
sank to the floor of the hut. We were safe, for the moment at
least.
It took a couple minutes for everyone’s breathing to go
back to normal. Neel was the first to recover. He glanced
around the shack. “This is as good a place as any to hide out
for the night. In the morning, we’ll have to find my
grandmother, to see if she can get us to the border safely.”
“Your grandmother?” I asked. “Wait a minute, I thought all
demons came from some faucet of evil or something.”
“Well, not all, obviously.” Neel pointed at his own chest.
“But yeah, most full rakkhosh are born from wells of dark
energy.”
“So how is she your grandmother?”
“Come on, your mom doesn’t have to be the one who gave
birth to you, but the one who raised you. I’d think you of all
people would understand that. My Ai-Ma is the one who
raised my mother.”
It was hard to imagine the Rakkhoshi Queen once being a
baby demon in someone’s warty arms.
“Some nanas knit or cook; his eats flesh!” Tuntuni quipped.
 “Don’t start,” Neel snapped, “unless you want me to give
you to her for lunch.” He turned to me. “Listen, you get some
rest. I’ll take the first watch.”
It was the gray morning when I at last opened my eyes. I
realized that Neel hadn’t woken me up to take over the watch.
“You looked tired,” he explained, yawning himself.
Neel hadn’t slept all night but was still pretty energetic as
he gathered our things, including the golden and silver
spheres, cradled like twin babies in his makeshift sling. This
morning they were buzzing and humming, letting off a red
glow and the warm smell of cotton and honey.
“They’re happy to be together,” I said.
“Make new orbs, but keep the old; one is silver and the
other gold,” Tuni sang.
“Tuni,” I warned, “maybe it’s a little too soon.”
“You are so spherical, so round and spherical, you make me
hap-py when rakkhosh stay,” the bird continued, ignoring me.
“Hmm … wonder if my grandma would fancy some Tuni-
bird stew,” Neel snapped. Immedately, the bird stopped
singing.
“Come on, let’s go.”
It was a long walk over a rubbish-filled stretch of land—
broken yo-yos, half-eaten peanut butter sandwiches, a few
scary-looking skulls, and more than a few smelly old socks,
none of them with a proper partner. As we walked, we saw no
one.
“They’re mostly nocturnal,” Neel said.
 “Like the snakes,” I offered. Neel gave me a half smile. He
seemed to get what I was saying. That my biological relatives
were just as terrible as his.
We were heading for a giant gorge between two steep
mountains on either side. When we got closer, gooseflesh
broke out on my arms. I wasn’t sure if it was coming from the
gorge itself, but the air was filled with an almost-deafening
rumbling sound. It sounded disturbingly like some very large
creature snoring.
“We’re almost there.” Neel stopped walking to look
critically at me. “You’re wearing my jacket, so that’s good.”
Neel picked up Tuntuni and, to my surprise, sat him right
on my head.
“Hey, what’s the big idea?” I asked as the bird squawked
his surprise too.
“As much as I don’t mind if my Ai-Ma makes chicken stew
out of the bird, I think I’d better try to get him home in one
piece. And he’ll be safer out of sight.” Neel pulled out a long
cloth from his pocket and wound it around both Tuntuni and
my hair, making a big, only slightly lumpy turban.
There were muffled sounds of Tuni squawking nervously.
“How do chickens get strong?” Without waiting for an answer,
the bird yelled out from inside the turban, “Eggs-ersize!”
“Chill, Tuni. We’ll be all right.” I patted my head. “Just try
not to dig your claws in, okay?”
“How do crows stick together in a flock?” came the
muffled question. And again, without waiting for an answer,
the bird squawked, “Velcrow!”
“How did the dead chicken cross the road?” Neel snapped.
“It didn’t, because it was dead!”
 That shut the bird up rather quickly.
Neel made a few more adjustments to my outfit, then
stepped back, obviously satisfied with the results. “You’ll
pass.”
I wasn’t sure what I was passing for—a bird-containing
turban certainly wasn’t going to fool anyone into thinking I
was a demon—but I was too exhausted to protest. Just like
Tuntuni, if I wanted to make it out of Demon Land alive, I was
going to have to trust Neel.
He reached into the food pouch at his waist and brought out
a handful of dark seeds. “Keep these just in case she asks you
to chew on anything,” he said.
Chew on something? I wanted to ask but the prince kept
walking. “Come on, we better get there before any of the other
rakkhosh wake up.”
We entered the gorge, and I realized that the awful snoring
had been coming from here after all. Those horrible rumbling,
shrieking, trilling noises were coming from the nose of an
elderly rakkhoshi who was fast asleep in the riverbed.
“Ai-Ma! Ai-Ma!” Neel called, gesturing to me to stay
behind him. “It’s your grandson, Neelkamal!”
The old crone sat up mid-snore, and then came flying at us.
Her knobby arms and legs were flapping, her gray hair was
streaming behind her, and her near toothless mouth was fixed
in a wide grin.
“Oh, my sugar plum yum-yum, my lollipop dum-dum, my
molasses-sweet grandbaby, oh me, oh my, oh, come and give
your old Ai-Ma a kiss!”
“She can’t see very well, and she can’t hear very well,”
Neel hissed as the old woman approached. “And she can’t
remember very well.” I felt my heart lighten, then fall again as
Neel added, “But unfortunately she can still smell really well.”
The old rakkhoshi crone bent far down, and standing high
on his toes, Neel gave her a gingerly kiss on her hairy cheek.
Then Ai-Ma began to sniff the air like a crazed hunting dog
catching the whiff of a fox.
“Grandbaby, my sweet boo-boo, have you brought a pet? A
human being to play with? A gift for your poor Ai-Ma?”
My turban shuddered. Neel slapped it. I didn’t love the
thought that Tuni or I might be considered a delicious gift, like
a box of cookies, for Neel’s grandmother.
“Ai-Ma!” Neel exclaimed. “What are you saying? This is
my brother, Lalkamal, and he’s your grandson too!”
The crone reached for me, but, feeling my turban first,
withdrew her hand.
“The brother of my gum-gum must be my grandbaby too,”
the old crone mused. “But why does he smell so much like a
human pup?”
Neel’s grandmother drew herself up to her full height, and
then, randomly, snorted out some iron pellets from her left
nostril.
“If you are my family true, here’s some iron pellets for you
to chew,” she sang, handing the booger-covered iron pieces to
me.
I had no choice but to take the revolting things. I slipped
the pellets into my jacket pocket, and substituted the seeds
Neel had given me. I chewed them as loud as I could. Ma
would be horrified at my table manners, but Ma would be even
more horrified if I was this old biddy’s main course for dinner.
 Ai-Ma smiled, but kept sniffing the air. “Is old Ai-Ma’s
nose fooling her? Why do I smell human flesh? And mixed in
with a nice roasted chicken?”
My turban muttered and wobbled again, but I gave it a
good punch.
“How can my grandbaby be so small? Let me see your
eyeball!” Neel’s grandmother demanded.
I looked in shock at Neel, who handed me the golden ball
from his sling. I held it out to the crone, who felt the bowling-
ball-sized object, and smiled.
“Oh, boys, what has become of your Ai-Ma? Why do I still
smell delectable meats?” The old crone’s mouth was watering,
and giant drops of spittle rained down from her mouth like a
fountain. She slurped loud and long.
“If of my flesh you are a part, why, let me see your beating
heart!”
“Ai-Ma!” Neel protested.
But I had an idea. I grabbed the biggest ruby from my
pocket. It was the size of a small lunch box, and gritty with sea
salt and sand. I rubbed it off the best I could and shoved it
toward the old rakkhoshi.
“Anything for you, Ai-Ma!” I said in a low voice.
The crone held the ruby up to her eyes, and murmured, “So
hard and large and red, and still I want my grandbaby’s head?
Oh, what have I done, what did I do? You must be my
grandson true!”
Returning the ruby to me, Ai-Ma grabbed us each in one of
her gangly arms and drew us up to her chest, crooning, “Oh,
my darling pom-poms, my shriveled beanpoles, my scrawny-
crow grandbabies!” Ai-Ma rocked and sang. “I am Ai-Ma,
mother of mother, for Lalu and Neelu, there is no other!”
I held my breath as the crone cooed at us. It was more than
a little disturbing. Finally, she put us down.
“Come, my honey-drenched num-nums, my caramel boo-
boos. It is time for Grammy to finish her nap. Neelu, you rub
old Ai-Ma’s feet, and, Lalu, you pull out her gray hairs.”
Ew. Really? I grimaced, but Neel gave me a warning
glance. It was obviously too dangerous to do otherwise. The
prince took a big bottle of mustard oil and began rubbing the
crone’s warty feet, while I sat by her head, massaging her
greasy scalp and pulling out long gray hairs one by one. They
were hard, the texture of steel guitar strings, plus they were
slippery, so it wasn’t easy. A few times, I had to use both
hands, with my foot on her head for leverage. Ai-Ma didn’t
seem to notice, but smiled blissfully and kept her eyes shut,
like we were giving her some kind of five-star spa treatment.
Her snores shook the gorge for about half an hour, but then,
with a mighty shake, she was awake again. Ai-Ma snorted and
hacked, then asked, “What can I do for my grandbabies who
have traveled so long to visit me?”
“Oh, we couldn’t ask for anything, Ai-Ma,” Neel protested,
still rubbing the noxious stuff into her feet. He stared at me
with big eyes.
“Oh, no, how could we, Ai-Ma?” I added in my fake
princely voice. My arms were aching from massaging the
crone’s head, and I had more than one cut on my hands from
pulling her awful gray hairs.
Without warning, Ai-Ma sat up. Neel and I both tumbled
off her.
 “Oh, shame shame, puppy shame, all the donkeys know
your name!” she protested. “How can this be? My grandbabies
must have a gift from their Ai-Ma—I have prepared no food, I
have no new clothes or toys to give you. Please, please do not
embarrass an old woman. What can Ai-Ma give you?”
“Well, Ai-Ma,” Neel suggested, “you could take us as far
as the border of Demon Land.”
“Done!” Ai-Ma promised, scooping us both into her giant
arms.
The rakkhoshi walked us through the desert of Demon
Land for seven days and eleven long nights. Her arms were
large enough to be warty hammocks, and Neel and I each
rested in the crook of an elbow. As comfortable as a warty
hammock may sound, let me assure you it was hard traveling.
The only trees on our path grew thorns or poisonous-looking
pods. There was little water, even less food, and no respite. Ai-
Ma grew tired once or twice, but I was so nervous of what
would happen if she stopped, that I kept telling her stories
from back home. Appropriately adapted for a demon, of
course. In most of them, Jovi was a greedy khokkosh.
As we left the desert, I was shocked to see such wanton
waste, filth, and destruction everywhere the rakkhosh had
been. There were piles of Styrofoam cups, mountains of
single-use drink bottles, and plastic cola six-pack holders that
no one had bothered to cut through.
“Demon Land needs a better recycling program!” I
protested. “Look at those plastic rings; if ducks get caught on
them, they might choke and die, Ai-Ma!”
“Well, I certainly hope so,” the old woman responded, her
eyes a little glassy. Her long tongue was drooling like a
dripping faucet on my turban, “Oh, grandbaby, forgive me,
this nose of mine keeps making me think of roasted goose,
partridge pie, chickadee stew!”
The turban almost jumped off my head in fright, but I held
it on tightly.
After seeing almost no one on our long walk, we now
approached a group of marauding rakkhosh, who were
marching as they sang:
“Good flesh, warm flesh,
Toasted nice and sweet!
We’ll suck their marrow, chew their bones,
And curry up their feet!”
“Old woman, what tasty morsels are these you carry?” the
head rakkhosh asked, peering at us with all three of his
bulging eyeballs.
Neel gulped audibly, and my own heart beat in time to
Tuntuni’s shudders on my head. Ai-Ma may have been half-
deranged, besides being sweet on us in a twisted sort of a way,
but these rakkhosh weren’t. They weren’t going to mistake me
for a demon prince with an oversized, live turban. If Ai-Ma
decided to hand us over, or got overpowered, we were goners.
Luckily, as Baba would say, Granny still had some
chutzpah left in her.
“Be gone, you fart-faces!” Ai-Ma shrieked, waving a
knobby arm. “These are my darling grandbabies, and if you so
much as break wind in their direction, my daughter the
Rakkhoshi Queen will have your entrails stuffed with gold and
made into necklaces!”
The other rakkhosh responded immediately.
“Oh, terribly sorry, ma’am,” the head rakkhosh apologized,
bowing low as he backed away.
 “Entirely our misunderstanding, madam,” said the one with
extra arms growing out of his chest.
“Unforgiveable, wretched thing to suggest,” said a third
demon, who had what looked like teeth for hair.
“Scram! Scat! Hato! Shoo!” Ai-Ma yelled, and they ran off
in the other direction.
“Your mother’s name sure packs a punch,” I said under my
breath to Neel.
He said nothing, but pointed ahead of him. We were finally
approaching the border. We knew this because of the sign that
read:
Thanks for Visiting Demon Land!
“The Bloodthirsty State”
State Symbol: The Razor Blade
State Flower: The Thorn
State Bird: The Vulture
State Song: “Meat, Glorious Meat”
100 million victims eaten daily
Be sure to visit again soon!
(Please drop by our gift shop for
a complimentary toothpick!)
With tears, hugs, and more than a few slobbery kisses, Ai-
Ma let us down.
“Good-bye, my licorice toadstools, farewell, my candied
beetle dungs, come back to visit your poor Ai-Ma soon!”
I guess we’re in the Mountains of Illusions.”
It was hard to miss the drastic change of scenery. Instead of
the carcass-filled, rubbish-strewn desert, we were now walking
through rolling hills, the kind I’d never seen before. The colors
were mesmerizing—shimmering blues, violets, yellows,
magentas, and greens swirled all around us. In fact, it was hard
to tell where the ground ended and the low-lying clouds began.
As soon as we were out of view from Demon Land, we
stopped to rest. We drank our fill from a sweet turquoise-
colored stream, and Neel helped me free Tuntuni from under
my turban. The poor bird was half-comatose from fright and
heat exhaustion, and crumpled next to me. It was great to feel
my head again. The mist was cool and the air rushing down
from the hills whistled through my hair.
“Now what?” I pulled out Ma’s moving map and studied it
through the python jewel. I was leaning against some pink
grass that felt like cotton candy on my skin. Well, cotton candy
minus the stickiness.
“I’m not sure.” Neel peered at the map over my shoulder.
“What was the next part of Tuni’s stupid poem?”
I looked around to ask the bird, but he wasn’t there.
“Tuni?” The violet-colored trees had some kind of fluffy fruit
hanging from them, and there were bushes with polka-dot
magenta-and-orange leaves. But no bird.
Where was he? Our diminutive yellow companion was
nowhere to be seen.
 Neel and I walked down a steep hill, all the while calling
Tuntuni’s name. The swirling mist was thick around our feet.
To my surprise, it also sparkled and made squeaking noises.
From a distance, we heard an odd little song,
“Ev-ry-thing
Is connected to
Ev-ry-thing,
But how?”
We followed Tuntuni’s voice until we came upon sort of a
valley, with folds of multicolored mist all around it. We
floated, more than walked, through the silky atmosphere.
There were shimmering lights everywhere—silver, yellow, hot
red, intense blue. My body felt light and airy, like I had turned
into cotton candy myself.
Then Tuni came into view, hanging from the branch of a
nearby tree.
“What in blessed bison jewels is he going on about?” Neel
muttered. Then he paused. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
I caught my breath. The yellow bird was sitting on a
sparkly branch that looked like it was covered in—could it be?
—diamonds.
“On a diamond branch the golden bird must sing a blessed
tune,” I quoted.
“Actually, I don’t think those are diamonds on that branch.”
Neel’s wide, dark eyes turned to mine. “I think they’re stars!”
Say what?
I took in the scenery around me—the swirling mist, the
colors, the sparkling lights. I had a sudden flash to a video that
Shady Sadie had shown on her science program about the
Andromeda Nebula.
“Where are we?” I whispered.
A different voice, not Tuntuni’s, but a man’s, answered
from very nearby.
“Why, it’s a star nursery of course, young lady. Ze
birthplace of baby stars.”

Who said that? I saw no one. Then I looked up and realized

Tuntuni wasn’t alone after all. An old man with a turban and a
white moustache sat cross-legged on a branch just above the
bird’s head. Or to be more accurate, the man levitated off the
branch above Tuni’s head.
“Your Brilliance!” Neel bowed. “It’s an honor to finally
meet you.”
“The famous half-demon prince,” said the man. “And this
must be Princess Kiranmala!”
 Tuntuni chirped in agreement. “Yes, Smartie-ji. This is
them!”
I stared at Tuntuni, then at Neel. They knew this guy? And
somehow, this floating stranger knew us?
The mist swirled around him, obscuring his features, but I
couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something really
familiar about him. What was he, like, a yogi with ESP? A
wise man, at least, from the way that Neel and Tuni were
addressing him.
Not wanting to seem rude, I dropped an ungraceful curtsy.
“Uh, hello, sir-ji.”
“Can you help us, Your Brilliance? We need to find Kiran’s
parents and rescue my brother and friend”—here he indicated
the gold and silver spheres hanging from his sling—“who are
trapped by a curse.”
But the wise man just smiled, adding even more crinkles to
his already wrinkly face. “You arrived just in time for my next
class. Find a seat! Find a seat! Quick now!” He clapped his
hands gleefully, like our presence was the best treat he could
receive.
From who knows where, there appeared a number of little
colorful chairs attatched to desks, like the contents of a
kindergarten classroom. From somewhere in the distance, a
bell rang, and suddenly almost all of the seats filled up with
sparkling orbs of light: little giggling, wiggling star-babies.
“Good morning, mein star pupils!” The wise man’s
singsong European accent made him seem familiar, but I
couldn’t place where I knew him from.
“Good mowning, pwofessor,” the infant stars chorused
back as Neel and I found the only two empty seats, near the
back of the floating classroom. The chairs were ridiculously
small, and the two of us barely squeezed ourselves into them,
our knees all splayed out in awkward ways.
“Now let us say our morning pledge together,” said the
mysterious professor from his position on the branch. All the
glowing star-children seemed to place their little hands over
their unidentified middles. Even Tuntuni placed a yellow wing
over his chest.
“We pledge allegiance to the element hydrogen, and also its
partner, helium,” chanted the little star-lings.
Neel and I giggled from the back row like we were the
classroom delinquents. Luckily, no one seemed to hear us, and
the stars kept pledging allegiance.
“And to the principle of nuclear fusion. Luminous light,
born from dust, nebula to stars, red giants to supernova, white
dwarf, neutron star, or black hole!”
“Very good, students! Gold stars for everyone!” The
floating wise man clapped his hands again. The force of his
pleasure turned him upside down, so that now he hung
suspended, folded legs above, moustache and turban below.
From this awkward position, the teacher pulled down a
rolling chart from the middle of the air. It showed a diagram
illustrating the pupils’ pledge—the life cycle of a star. He
cleared his throat and waggled his bushy white eyebrows in
my direction.
“Your parents, Princess, will soon be in danger of being
swallowed forever by what you know as a black hole.” The
upside-down professor pointed with a yardstick at the end of
the diagram.
“How do I save them?” I begged.
“Shall we tell her, pupils?” the professor singsonged as he
spun himself right side up once again.
 The baby stars laughed and shimmered. Pushing their
chairs aside, they joined what I supposed were their hands and
began dancing in a circle. Like a game of intersteller Ring
Around the Rosie. Then they started singing:
“Red, red, red are all my clothes
Red, red, red, is all that I have
Why do I love all that is red?
Because my brother is a red giant.”
The teacher waved his fingers in the air like he was
conducting the music. “A nursery rhyme from my own
youth!” he said.
“Lal?” Neel’s voice rose suddenly in alarm, and I noticed,
just as he did, that the golden sphere—Lal’s sphere—was
beginning to glow. It now looked far more red than golden.
Red like his name. Red like the red giant a star becomes when
it is in the process of dying.
“Your Brilliance,” I began, but the wise man just shook his
head, indicating that the stars were about to start singing again.
They whirled in the other direction, faster than before, their
bodies a dizzying display of light and energy against the
multicolor backdrop of the nebula.
“White, white, white are all my clothes
White, white, white is all that I have
Why do I love all that is white?
Because my sister is a white dwarf.”
“Mati!” And sure enough, the silver sphere in Neel’s
makeshift sling was now glowing with a bright white light.
Both spheres were also pulsing strangely, the red-gold one
looking like it was growing and the silver one like it was
shrinking.
 “What’s happening, Genius-ji?” Neel shouted out, but
Tuntuni pecked him on the head and squawked, “Raise your
hand, raise your hand.”
I felt like slapping the bird, but Neel obediently did as he
was told, wiggling his hand in the air with impatience. Yet the
old man ignored him, despite Neel’s repeatedly calling out,
“Sir, I have a question! Sir, I have a question!”
As the star pupils began their last verse, I felt my stomach
do a double back handspring into a round-off layout, and not
stick the landing.
“Black, black, black are all my clothes
Black, black, black is all that I have
Why do I love all that is black?
Because my parents got swallowed by a really evil
rakkhosh and then got lost forever and
ever in a black ho-o-le!”
“How do I stop that from happening?” I asked, but as it
seemed to be recess in the star nursery now, the wise man
couldn’t hear me over his pupils’ racket.
The star students were all tumbling about, tossing balls of
poofy pink clouds, playing double-Dutch jump rope and what
looked like hopscotch. One of the stars was asking another one
riddles: “What’s red, then white, then black all over?” it asked.
The other pupil shouted out, “A dying star!”
In the meantime, the wise man sang out Tuni’s meaningless
song again, clapping in beat to the syllables.
“Ev-ry-thing
Is connected to
Ev-ry-thing,
 But how?”
“But what should we do? We need your help here!” I
blurted out in frustration. “Enough riddles, enough poems,
enough songs with ominous meanings. I need some answers
that make sense!”
“None of us can hide from who we really are,” the
professor said unhelpfully. He batted one of the round pink
ball-clouds in our direction, making Neel’s entire head
invisible for a moment.
“What does that mean?”
“You must see yourself in the birthplace of darkness. You
must travel through the darkness to find your inner light.” The
wise man picked up a few sparkling crystals from the branch
and started juggling some stars who were even smaller than
his pupils. They giggled and squealed in glee as he tossed
them in the air. “Darkness and light must always be kept in a
fine balance.”
I shot to my feet. “What darkness? The spell holding my
parents?”
The old man opened his palm to show me one perfect
shimmering orb. “Stars are not only spells, but a deeper magic
still: the wishes and dreams nurtured in the deepest places of
our souls.”
He blew the star out of his hand like it was a bit of
dandelion fluff, and watched it float to another cluster of
playing stars a few feet away, who gathered up the baby star in
their game. The man spun in the air so that now he was
levitating again with his crossed legs up, and his twinkling
blue eyes down.
“Kiran!” Neel warned. He showed me the sling. Lal’s
sphere was now entirely red and vibrating ferociously. I could
also swear it was double its original size. Mati’s sphere, in the
meantime, was glowing bright white but was now about the
size of a large grapefruit.
“What’s happening to them?” I demanded of the professor.
“The prince and the stable maiden—they wanted to be
together, however that was possible, yes?”
I considered that. Lal and Mati, they did want to be
together. But not like this, surely?
“And your parents, Princess, they wanted you to discover
who you are, to be proud of where you came from, yes?”
He was right on the money there. That’s the only thing my
parents ever wanted. But had they imagined they would have
to risk their lives for it to happen?
“These wishes cannot happen without consequences.
Darkness is the night side of light. The forgotten brother. The
exiled self.”
Now that hit a little close to home. Was he talking about
Neel—the forgotten brother—and me—the exiled self? Were
we the dark matter to Lal and Mati’s friendship, to my parents’
deepest wishes?
The old guy kept spinning, so that now he was lounging
sideways in the air, his fingers twirling his white moustache.
“It is the separations between darkness and light that are
the illusion, my dear.” He waggled his bushy brows. “Illusion
like the ring you see when light tries to travel around the dark
matter in its path. Remember this, my dear, remember my ring
and you will find what you are looking for.”
“I don’t understand,” I began.
But he was singing again, “Ev-ry-thing is connected to ev-
ry-thing.”
 “But how?” I asked.
“Eggs-actly! Perfectly put!” He pulled off his turban, and
made an old-fashioned bow in my direction. “Chase the giant,
cradle the dwarf, and find the well of dark energy before it
folds in on itself and those you love are lost forever. But
hurry!”
Then, just like that, he disappeared.
Why was the wise man so familiar? That crazy hair going in
all different directions, that accent, that moustache. Oh my
gosh!
“Was that who I think it was?”
Tuntuni squawked and nodded his yellow head. “The one
and only Einstein-ji.”
“The physicist from your world whose name is practically
synonymous with intelligence,” Neel added.
I swallowed my spit the wrong way and choked. Tuni had
to swat me on the back with his wing for me to regain my
breath. “Albert Einstein?” I finally managed. “Albert Einstein
is our golden bird on a diamond branch?”
“He was one of the few scientists from your dimension to
understand the seven parallel worlds, the thirteen simultaneous
universes.”
“But isn’t he, like …” I paused. “Dead?”
“Well, technically, yes. At least, in the way we understand
death. Remember, this is a guy who unlocked the secrets of
space, time, and a bunch of other things I don’t even know
about. It’s he who first predicted dark matter to begin with.”
But I didn’t have time to process this mind-blowing piece
of information, because the red and white spheres were
making noises, groaning and squeaking. The red one hopped
out of Neel’s sling on its own, and began rolling up the hill
and out of the star nursery.
 “Wait, Lal, stop!” Neel yelled, chasing after him.
I had no option but to run after Neel, and what I was soon
realizing was Lal manifesting into a red giant star. As Neel ran
after his brother the red giant, the white sphere, which had
shrunk now to the size of a nectarine, slipped out of his sling
and began rolling down the hill toward me.
“Mati!” Neel yelled, but I dived for the rolling star-sphere,
catching it and holding it in my palm like it was one of those
crazy predict-your-future Magic 8 Balls.
“Got her!”
We ran after the red giant, who now looked less like Lal, or
even a sphere, as opposed to a huge mass of pulsating solar
energy. Although no less scary, this was no fee-fi-fo-fum kind
of giant, but something else entirely. It was as if a huge forest
inferno suddenly grew some legs and began running across the
landscape.
In fact, as the red giant ran, he wreaked havoc all around
him. The fuzzy purple trees of the nebula caught on fire,
exploding in cracking cascades of flames.
“Lal! Stop!” Neel called, but the red giant didn’t hear him.
This wasn’t Lal anymore but something beyond human. He
was a solar phenomenon.
We ran through walls of flames exploding over the
formerly azure plains. Branches cracked and fell too near my
head for comfort. Where was the red giant going? How would
we survive chasing a monster essentially made out of fire?
The white dwarf in my hands buzzed, as if with worry for
Lal too. I shook it desperately.
“Mati,” I called. “If there’s something of you left in there,
help us. I need to save my parents before they get swallowed
by the spell turning into a black hole. But I don’t know where
they are, and I don’t know how long they have.”
Tick, tick, tick …
Amazingly, some part of Mati must have heard me. The
ticktocking noise was coming from the white dwarf. Its face
resembled something like a clock now. But the labels on the
clock’s face were like nothing like I’d ever seen before. They
were the phases of a star cycle—nebula, star, red giant, white
dwarf, supernova, and black hole. And the clock’s single hand
was pointing right at the third position, the red giant.
“Where is he going?” Neel called out desperately. “Lal!
Bro! Stop! It’s me! Dude, it’s me!”
But the red giant kept running, setting everything in its path
on fire. Neel and I were running side by side, a charred-
looking Tuntuni on his shoulder, and the white-dwarf-slash-
clock in my hand. The mist was getting thicker, and the
ground looked more orange than blue now, because the entire
nebula was on fire. The heat was getting unbearable, and poor
Tuntuni squawked as he lost one feather after another.
“Lal!” I tried. “I know some part of you can hear us! Tell us
where we’re going before you burn us to cinders!”
Tick, tick, tick …
Mati’s timepiece was now pointing at the space in between
the red giant and white dwarf. Which meant it was creeping
even closer to the black hole. Which was essentially my
parents’ death.
“We’ve got to hurry, Neel!” I showed him the clock,
indicating the all too rapidly moving arm. “My parents don’t
have much more time!”
As if in answer to the danger my parents faced, the
landscape itself seemed to change. Instead of the pastel colors
and glowing atmosphere, there were spiky bushes and black
trees with thorn-covered branches. In front of us, the red giant
ran through a hastily put up cardboard archway. It was a little
crooked, and decorated to look like a demon’s open mouth,
complete with fangs hanging down toward us. On the garishly
painted signboard, near the top, was the word:
DENGAR
As the red giant ran through it, it set the flimsy sign on fire.
Neel and I both stopped short, avoiding the falling embers and
pieces of burning cardboard.
“Dengar?” I shouted, to make myself heard above the noise
of the burning sign. “Really?”
“English is not everyone’s first language,” Neel explained
defensively, raising his arm to protect Tuntuni from a floating
piece of flaming cardboard.
I realized there were a few other signboards here and there
around the burning archway with crazy slogans painted on
them too. Before they started to catch fire and burn, I saw that
most of them were warnings for people setting out to fight
rakkhosh:
AFTER WHISKY, FIGHTING DEMoNS RISKY
and
IF YOU SlEEP, YoUR FAMIlY WIll WEEP
in addition to
RAKKHOSH BABIES DON’T SAY MAYBE!
and the ever popular
FIGHT DEMONIC FOOLS AND FORM BLOOD POOLS!
“The well of demonic energy must be nearby, right?”
 Neel didn’t have a chance to reply, because, just then,
Mati’s clock hand started ticktocking even louder than before.
“Oh no! Neel! Look!”
We watched as the clock hand now swept right past the
white dwarf to hover somewhere right before the black hole
mark. As it did so, the glowing white shape in my arms began
transforming once again into the silver sphere I knew and
loved.
“Neel! I’m running out of time!”
But Neel had run ahead of me through the almost burned-
out “Dengar” archway and was picking up the other sphere. It
had magically transformed back into the golden bowling ball
that we were used to, its red giant manifestation complete.
And while that brought some strange degree of comfort—to
see Mati and Lal back to their magical sphere forms—it also
reminded me that the spell we were dealing with was almost at
an end. As was the time I had left to find my parents.
“What do I do?” I cried.
“Look for the ring! Look for the ring!” squawked Tuntuni
from Neel’s shoulder. The bird was pointing at what looked
like a simple pile of boulders in front of us. Now that it had
stopped raining fiery cardboard from the sky, I could approach
it.
“What is this?”
I wasn’t sure if I actually had tears in my eyes, or if it was
the swirling mist, because, all of a sudden, the rock formation
began to glow.
“Dr. Einstein said to look for a ring of light …” I
remembered aloud.
 “Einstein’s ring! Of course!” Neel was tucking the golden
and silver spheres back into his makeshift sling. “Einstein
predicted that dark matter must exist in the universe because
he noticed that light from distant stars sometimes looks like
circles of light instead of pinpoints.”
“Oh, right, I heard about this on a science program,” I
added. “He realized there must be something in the way—so
that the light had to travel all around the object before making
it to Earth. Hence, Einstein’s ring.”
At Neel’s surprised expression, I shrugged defensively. “I
never said I wasn’t good at science.”
Neel nodded, squinting at the glowing rocks. I followed his
gaze.
In between the gaps in the boulders, I could make out
something glimmering with a strange, magical force. Without
a second thought, I began to climb up the slippery stones.
“What are you doing?” Neel took my arm.
I glared at him, and he dropped his hand. “There’s
something in the middle there, and I’m going to find out what
it is!”
I scrambled up the rocks, but when Neel tried to follow me, I
waved him off.
“You might have to come rescue me!” I cautioned. “My
Baba always says, two men should not go into a jackal’s den.”
“Your Baba has a lot of really, uh, fascinating sayings,”
said Neel as I began to climb, carefully placing my foot in one
crevice and then another. My hands gripped and slipped and
got cut on the sharp stones, but I kept on climbing. I had no
choice. My parents’ lives depended on me.
Finally, after a slightly harrowing few minutes, I was at the
top of the stones. Even though I hadn’t been able to see it from
the ground, I realized the boulders were surrounding a central
hollow—a crater-like hole at the top. I perched on the edge of
the open space, peering down, not understanding what I was
seeing.
“What is it?” Neel called.
When I didn’t answer right away, Tuntuni flew up to land
on my shoulder. As the bird and I peered into the hole
together, I finally understood.
“I don’t think this is just any old pile of boulders,” I called
down to Neel. “I think it’s a well!”
As I saw my own face and Tuntuni’s birdy visage reflected
back to me from the well’s water, I realized it must be true.
“A well of dark energy!” Neel exclaimed. “Your parents
must be there!”
 “I know, but how do I find them? How do I get them out?”
My voice echoed weirdly off the stone sides.
“We don’t have much time!” Neel cautioned.
“It’s the night of the new moon,” Tuntuni said, looking at
the sky. “When the dark moon rises is the time that marks
when a rakkhosh is born.”
The mist was getting darker now, swirling around in grays
and blacks rather than vivid colors. Soon it would be time for
the moon to rise. Or, rather, it would be the night of the new
moon. And my parents’ time would be up.
I blinked hard, trying to keep my cool. “Dark matter
scatters light …” I repeated to myself.
I peered at the wobbly reflection of my own determined
face in the well’s dark fluid, its surface a bit thicker and more
oily than water. But still, I saw myself in the darkness. Our
golden bird was right.
“Ma? Baba?” I called tentatively. There was no answer.
“We found it,” I mumbled to myself. “But now what?”
Neel said there were lots of wells of dark energy; how did I
know this was the right one? Could I even be sure that my
parents were in here? And if they were, how the heck was I
going to fish them out of this magic, invisible goo?
I didn’t have a lot of time. The mists were getting even
darker. I had to find out if my parents were below the surface
of that water. And there was only one way to do it. I yanked
off my jacket and shoes, getting ready to dive into the well.
Stop! Ma’s voice yelled.
What are you, a few mangoes short of a bushel? Baba
echoed.
 I stopped. As clear as if they were standing next to me, I
heard my parents’ voices.
“Stop, Kiran, you can’t dive into a well. You’ll kill
yourself,” Neel shouted from below.
“Yeah, that’s what my parents just said.” I put my shoes
back on.
“Okay, let’s just think this through,” Neel continued.
“Every step, we’ve known we’re on the right track because we
had evidence. The moving map led us over the sea, where we
found the red rubies from Tuntuni’s poem.”
“Right,” I shouted back. The jewels were still heavy in my
pockets.
“Then the map led us through Demon Land to here—and
we knew it was Maya Pahar because another one of the
poem’s lines came true—‘on a diamond branch a golden bird
must sing a blessed song.’”
“Yeah, yeah,” I sputtered impatiently. Ma and Baba’s time
was running out while Neel was pontificating. “Let’s move it
along, haven’t got all night here. On a bit of a pre-apocalyptic
deadline.”
“So let’s think about the next part of the poem. It’s gotten
us this far.”
“ ‘Neelkamal and Kiranmala, heed my warning well,’ ” I
muttered, “ ‘Your families will crumble, your life an empty
shell.’ ” My arms were covered in goose bumps. I wasn’t
going to let that happen. No way! “ ‘Unless you find the jewel
in evil’s hidden room, cross ruby seas full of love beneath the
dark red moon.’ ”
“ ‘In a monster’s arms be cradled and cross the desert wide,
in the Mountains of Illusions find a wise man by your side,’ ”
Neel said. “And then comes that line about Einstein-ji—on a
diamond branch, a golden bird must sing a blessed song.”
“And then those lines about Lal and Mati—follow brother
red and sister white not a moment too long.”
“What’s the next line?” Neel asked, fishing around in his
pockets. He pulled out some gum, a broken pencil, and some
of the sea rubies, but not the paper he’d written the poem on.
“I know I wrote it down here somewhere.”
“Something about golden and silver balls?” I asked
nervously, my mind a racing blank. I didn’t have time to be
discussing poetry stanzas, I had to get my parents!
“ ‘In your heart’s fountain, set the pearly waters free,’ ”
said Tuntuni. “I can’t believe you numskulls don’t remember.
Really, it is so hard to find people who appreciate good lyric
verse these days.”
“ ‘In your heart’s fountain, set the pearly waters free,’ ” I
repeated, looking into the dark well. What did that remind me
of? When had I heard about pearls and water? Waters and
pearls? I snapped my fingers. The transit officer. What had that
riddle been? The ocean’s pearl, a grain of sand, more precious
than all the gold in the land …
“Neel!” I called. “I think I know what we have to do!”
I reached into my pocket and ran my hand over some of the
smaller rubies I had stashed in there. My hand came out gritty
and sticky, full of salt from the sea. “Set the pearly waters
free,” I repeated.
“What are you talking about?” Neel yelled.
I raised my voice a couple notches. “Listen, when I had to
answer the transit officer’s riddle, the puzzle was something
about the ocean’s pearl, a grain of sand—something without
which life would be bland. It turned out the answer was salt.”
 “Something white like a pearl, from the ocean, small like a
grain of sand,” said Neel. “Life would certainly be bland
without salt.”
“Neel, what if the word ‘pearl’ in Tuntuni’s poem refers to
salt too? What if we have to set the salty waters of the fountain
free?” I started to empty the red jewels from my pockets into
the shadowy well, and was gratified to hear a plunk with every
stone.
“You think we have to get rid of all our rubies?” Neel
shouted.
“Unless you have a saltshaker on you. The rubies are
coated in sea salt!” I dug out the jewels and threw them into
the water. Plink. Plunk. I had them stashed all over: my pants,
shirt, backpack.
“Baba used to tell me this story about a thirsty crow who
found a well during a drought,” I explained as I threw more
jewels into the deep. “The well water was so low the crow
couldn’t reach it. Now a different animal may have dived in, to
his death …”
“Isn’t that what you were just about to do?” Neel was
emptying all the rubies from his pockets, and Tuntuni was
flying them up to me a few at a time in his beak. I tossed them
all into the well of dark energy.
“But the crow was clever, and instead of jumping in, began
to gather all the stones he could, and throw them into the
well.”
Plink, plunk, plink. The noise was getting louder now, as if
the water level was rising. I cautiously leaned over. Sure
enough, my wobbly reflection was several feet closer now
than it had been before.
 “Finally, the water rose high enough, and the crow could
reach his beak in and quench his thirst.”
I was getting down to our last rubies. Plink. Plunk. The
dark water was now almost to the top of the well. My
reflection was so close I could reach out and touch it.
“It’s a good theory, Kiran,” Neel called. “Except that I’m
all outa rubies, and the waters still aren’t flowing free.”
He was right. My reflection was just teetering on the edge
of the boulders. My heart sunk.
“Wait a minute, there’s one more stone.” With a deep
breath, I pulled out the python jewel from my jacket pocket.
“Princess, stop!” squawked Tuntuni.
“No, Kiran, we have no way of reading the map without
it!” Neel shouted. “How are we going to get home?”
“I have no home without my family,” I explained,
remembering that Neel had said almost the same thing about
Lal to their father. “I’m sorry, I can’t leave without them.”
PLUNK.
And with that, the salty waters of the dark well overflowed.
Maybe overflowed is the wrong word. More like exploded in a
geyser-like fountain of intergalactic dark energy. The force of
the stuff made me fly off the stones and onto the ground,
landing with a crash—yet again—on Neel. I hardly had time to
catch my breath, because then we were both being bombarded
by boulders from the exploding well. Neel took the brunt of it,
shielding me from the stones with his own body. We both
ducked, trying to protect our heads from the falling liquid and
debris. Okay, maybe the
python jewel was a little more umph than entirely necessary
for this procedure.
But then there they were. A little wet, but none the worse
for having been trapped under the surface of a magic well. My
parents. Those horrible landscapers. Those overenthusiastic
dessert-makers. Those total nuts.
“Ma! Baba!” I wrapped my arms around them. “I’m so
happy to see you!”
“Darling moonbeam garland! Let me look at you!” Ma
gushed, pulling away and taking my chin in two fingers. “Such
dark circles! Ki holo? Not been sleeping well without your
bear?”
“Ma! You know I haven’t slept with Binkie Bear for
years!” I turned my face away from her prying eyes only to be
accosted by Baba.
 “Have you been getting enough fiber, darling? No problems
with constipation, na?”
“Oof!” Ma joined in. “I remember that one time you had
such terrible problems with your bowels …”
OMG! Forget a rakkhosh, my parents were going to kill me
with embarrassment.
Luckily, they had no time to make any more inappropriate
observations, because the misty ground started to rumble
under our feet.
Wordlessly, Neel pointed at the dark sky, his face ashen. I
saw nothing. No sliver of a moon, no trace of an outline. The
heavens were entirely dark. But I knew. The new moon had
risen.
“Run!” Tuntuni squawked. “A baby demon’s about to be
born!”
As we ran, my parents yelled endearments, luckily minus any
more unnecessary comments about my fiber intake.
“I never believed I would see you again,” Baba sobbed as
he vaulted over a misty boulder. “My sweet girl! Do you
forgive us for not telling you about the spell?”
His belly bounced a little as he ran, and the end of Ma’s
sari flapped crazily behind her, not to mention how totally
messy and off-center her bouffant was.
“Oh, I knew you would find us, my darling. I, for one”—
and here, Ma gave Baba a superior look—“had faith in you.
You are, after all, a real Indian princess! As I have told you all
along!”
There was a horrible groaning behind us as the rakkhosh
baby woke up. Its time was up, and I was pretty sure, from its
screeches, it was hungry.
Let me tell you, none of us needed a motivational motion
device. Apparently, hanging out in all that primordial goop
was like some kind of triple-wheatgrass shot for old folks,
because my parents were hauling butt right along with Neel
and me. In fact, Tuntuni was hitching a ride on Baba’s
shoulder. If we weren’t running for our lives, we could have
collected some of that well fluid and started a fabulous new
line of vitamins: Demonic Silver—dark energy–filled vitamins
for the senior set.
As it was, we had more important things to worry about.
Like surviving the hunger pangs of a very persistent newborn
rakkhosh. I snuck a glance over my shoulder. It wasn’t in a
diaper or anything, but something about its eyes was really—
well, maybe innocent isn’t the right word—but young,
anyway. It was short for a rakkhosh, maybe only seven or
eight feet tall. It had putrid, moldy skin, open boils, and about
six horns coming every which way out of his head—maybe
some kind of homage to Einstein-ji, I wasn’t sure. Of course, it
also had the requisite fangs through which a more-than-
requisite amount of drool was flowing. Its mouth was open
like a gigantic vacuum, and I saw a few infant stars, some
space dust, and some trees get sucked in.
“Stop! Din-ner! No run! Bogli hungry!” the baby demon
yelled. It screwed up its ugly face in a wail. “Go in my belly
now!”
“‘Bogli’ doesn’t rhyme?” I shouted at Neel.
“He hasn’t been to demon school yet,” he explained,
helping Ma leap over some orange-colored bushes.
“If he wasn’t trying to cannibalize us, I might actually feel
sorry for him.”
“Are you kidding?” he yelled back. “He’ll chew us up and
use our bones for rattles!”
The demon spawn was gaining on us.
“Kiran, try to slow him down with some arrows!” Neel
yelled as he helped Baba regain his balance over a tough patch
of magenta stones.
I shot a couple of well-aimed arrows to the demon’s nose,
eye, and belly—soft spots—which didn’t seem to slow the
rakkhosh down at all. In fact, the demon baby’s eyes grew red
with fury.
“Oo, you mean!” he shrieked. “Bogli eat you first! And
make it hurt!”
 Dang. I probably tasted better than vinegar and chili chips.
I kept booking.
“Where are we going?”
It was dark, but the Maya Pahar mist had a luminous
quality, so I could see the outlines of shapes as we ran along.
In fact, some of those fuzzy purple trees were looking a little
too familiar.
When we passed a blinking neon sign, I knew my
suspicions were right:
THANKS FOR VISITING THE
MOUNTAINS OF ILLUSIONS
HOME OF THE ANDROMEDA STAR NURSERY!
BE SURE TO VISIT THE WELL OF DARK ENERGY
(IF YOU CAN FIND IT)!
TAKE A TOUR OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST
HALLUCINATION AND STAR FACTORY!
MAYA PAHAR: OUR ILLUSIONS ARE
YOUR DELUSIONS.
COME BACK SOON!
“‘Our illusions are your delusions’?” Baba panted as we
ran past the sign. “A terrible slogan! I was just reading in the
New Jersey small business owners’ newsletter how the right
branding is very important to customer loyalty …”
“Never mind that now!” I yelled. “If we keep going in this
direction, we’re going to go back to …”
I didn’t have to finish my sentence, because right in front of
us was a familiar shoreline.
“Oh, rotting tail feathers!” Tuntuni squawked. “It’s Demon
Land again!”
 It was. I’d recognize that carcass-riddled coast anywhere.
Only, the moving land masses apparently decided it was a
good time to start shifting. We stumbled as the ground beneath
our feet started moving in a smooth semicircle. It was what I
imagine it might be like to watch tectonic plates shift—like
when Africa broke away from Europe—just in superfast time-
lapse photography.
Demon Land’s shoreline shifted one way, and Maya
Pahar’s another. To the left, the Ruby Red Sea came into view,
with some of its peacock barges lined up close to the shore. It
was a strange sight—three different land masses each rotating
away from the other. And we were at the point of the bizarre
triangle.
Tuntuni flew off Baba’s shoulders to scout the moving
ledge. “It’s not too far—you’ll have to jump for the barges!”
“You must be illusional and delusional!” cried Baba.
But Bogli the demon was gaining on us quickly. The
ground trembled and the air was filled with his spoiled-eggy
breath.
“Bogli eat you now!”
“It’s the only way,” Neel said apologetically to Ma and
Baba. “I’ll go last to help you all make it.”
I looked at my parents, who nodded. Demonic wheatgrass
shots, check. Ridiculous level of faith in Neel, check. No other
choices, check.
I decided to jump first. If it wasn’t possible to hit the boat
from here, I wanted it to be me who found that out.
“I’ll go to make sure—” I started saying, when a shrieking
voice cut me off.
“In my belly!”
 “Go!” I felt Neel’s hand push me, and I was in the air. I fell
for a ridiculously long time, but somehow, miraculously, made
it. I landed with a thunk on the floor of a peacock barge.
“Come on!”
Baba and Tuni came next. Well, Baba came next but the
bird flew alongside him as he fell, shouting encouragement.
He actually ended up hitting the water, but it was a short swim
into the boat. As I dragged him in, I yelled up to Ma and Neel,
“Let’s go!”
They didn’t have a lot of time. The demon was gaining on
them. I was sweating bullets. Would they make it?
“Bweakfast! Lunch! Din-din! Snack!” The demon’s claw
was right over their heads.
“Jump!”
Neel and Ma leaped, hand in hand. But at the last minute,
one of the demon’s talons caught on Ma’s sari. She lost hold of
Neel’s hand.
“No!” he yelled, trying to reach her. In mid-fall, he threw
her his sword. Which—and this is the real testimony to how
much horsepower must’ve been in that dark energy goo—Ma
actually caught.
“Me eat the mommy! Me eat the mommy!” the demon brat
howled.
“Hya!” And that’s when my mother—my sweet-making,
inventory-taking, ever practical, ever optimistic mother—did
the bravest thing I have ever seen her do. Just as I had sliced
through Lal’s scarf to free him from the demon on our front
lawn, Ma sliced through the loose end of her sari, leaving the
demon rug rat bereft and meal-less.
Unfortunately, it also left Ma without anything to hang on
to, nowhere near the peacock barge. She fell like a rock—right
over Demon Land.
Ma!” I screamed. I couldn’t watch, I couldn’t watch, I
couldn’t watch!
Baba and I grabbed each other and held on.
My eyes were closed, but I opened them when Tuntuni
exhaled. “She’s okay!”
Unfortunately, what I saw made me scream again. Ma was
alive, yes, but she wasn’t exactly safe. When Ma cut herself
free, she fell in the direction of Demon Land. And on that
awful shore was a very familiar figure.
“Ai-Ma!” Neel shouted.
“Ma!” I yelled at the same time.
The drooling old crone held my mother in the palm of her
ginormous, warty hand. Ma was looking right at her, her hands
in a “namaskar.” I couldn’t hear what Ma was saying, but she
seemed to be pleading for her life.
“Bogli hungwy!” the demon brat wailed from the border of
Maya Pahar, but we all ignored him. The border had shifted
even farther away from us now, and the baby demon didn’t
seem to know how to get to us.
I focused on what was going on in Demon Land. I aimed
my bow and arrow, not caring that it was Neel’s grandma I
was aiming at.
“Let her go, Ai-Ma!” My voice shook with fury. I didn’t
come this far to see my mother get eaten.
“Kiran, please!” Neel begged.
 But I didn’t let him distract me from my target. My arrow
was pointed right at the old rakkhoshi’s chest. “Put her down!”
And that’s when Ai-Ma shocked the heck out of all of us.
She reached her knobbly hand in Ma’s direction, and, very
gently, patted her on the head.
“Ai-Ma isn’t so old she can’t recognize a girl from a boy, or
a prince from a pup,” the crone cackled. As she guffawed, her
hairy cheeks puffed out in pleasure. “You have a very brave—
and yummy-smelling—daughter,” she told Ma, her rough
voice carrying over the distance.
Ai-Ma’s lips were covered with drool and her tongue
waggled a little, but she walked straight toward the shore of
the Ruby Red Sea. No sign of even nibbling a little on her
captive. The arm bearing my mother reached out farther and
farther from the old rakkhoshi’s shoulder, until, like some
extendable fire hose, it reached our peacock barge.
“I give you back to your little coconut beanpole.” Ai-Ma—
or rather, Ai-Ma’s extended hand—gently deposited Ma in the
barge. “Your nub-nub was good company to old Ai-Ma, and
old Ai-Ma always remembers a favor.”
Before it retracted, Ai-Ma’s warty hand chucked me under
the chin. I know she was trying to be gentle, but she made my
teeth seriously rattle.
“Be good, sweet beetle-dung toadstools,” she cooed from
the distant shore.
I threw down my bow and arrow in the bottom of the barge
and held my mother tight.
“Thank you, Ai-Ma, thank you!” I yelled as Neel and Baba
pushed the barge farther and farther away from the shore of
both Demon Land and Maya Pahar.
 “Head straight across the sea and you will make it home!”
Ai-Ma waved to us, a three-toothed grin on her face. “I make
it a rule not to eat mommies while their boo-boos watch,” she
called as we sailed. “It’s bad for my digestion!”
* * *
“What a nice grandmother you have, Prince Neelkamal.” Ma
beamed. We’d been sailing for a while into the Ruby Red Sea,
and everything seemed relatively calm.
Baba had stopped hugging Ma, and now was just wiping
tears away and thanking Neel. “Yes, a very nice … erm …
woman.” Ma elbowed him, making him cough. “Most
charming.”
I shook my head and smiled as I looked out over the calm,
dark waters. People—even demon people—really surprised
you sometimes.
“How is my brother?” Ma asked Neel. “And my lovely
niece, how is she keeping up with her stable-hand duties?”
“Wait, Neel knows your brother?”
“The prince didn’t tell you, darling?” Baba was rowing us
into the dark night, with Tuni perched comfortably on his
shoulder. “We were knowing something unexpected might
happen around your twelfth birthday, so we took some
precautions.”
Ma patted my arm. “It was your uncle Rahul, the stable
master, who suggested that the Princes Lalkamal and
Neelkamal might be dispatched to help you.”
“Wait,” I said, “let me get this straight. Lal and Neel’s
stable master is your brother?”
My mother nodded.
 Neel had just finished explaining the Queen’s unfortunate
decision to eat Lal and Mati, and their subsequent
transformation into inanimate objects.
I pointed at the humming silver object in Neel’s sling. “So
that bowling ball is my cousin?” No wonder Mati felt so
familiar to me.
“Oh, yes,” Baba agreed. “But as you know, where we come
from, even the most distant cousin is called a sister.”
My cousin Mati, I thought. My sister Mati. After having
had so little family for so long—and then recently discovering
some less-than-desirable family members—it was nice to
know I had some normal relatives. If you count someone who
was trapped inside a silver bowling ball—and occassionally
turned into a solar phenomenon—normal.
“I can’t believe we still don’t know how to get them b-a-
ck.” Neel kind of sputtered that last word, because just then,
the boat lurched to the right.
“Oh, I think I have an idea,” I said. “The golden branch in
the poem must mean …” I stopped mid-thought, because the
boat swayed again.
“What was that?” Ma looked over the edge. “The water
seems so calm.”
“Oh, nothing,” said Tuni drowsily. “We’re almost—”
But he couldn’t finish his sentence because the next lurch
of the boat sent him flying off Baba’s shoulder and onto the
floor of the barge. We all collapsed to the left.
“I’m getting a bad feeling about this …” I drew an arrow
from my quiver.
But before I had a chance to shoot it I was coughing up
water from a wave that rushed over the entire boat. We were
knee-deep and the boat was still tossing on the newly rough
seas.
“Bail! Bail!” Neel yelled, his hair streaming into his face.
We all grabbed whatever we could to chuck water overboard,
but all of our hard work was meaningless when the next big
wave swept over the peacock barge in a few minutes.
“Are we all okay?” Neel shouted. I took a glance around.
Except for being drenched, and the terrified expressions, we
all seemed to be in one piece.
But the respite was half as long as the last time. I’d only
just scooped a couple quiverfuls of water out of the boat when
another wave hit.
“Gaak!” Tuni went overboard, but Baba grabbed a feathery
wing and yanked him back.
“I’m afraid this doesn’t seem like an altogether natural
storm,” Ma ventured, ever grammatical, even in a crisis.
There was a weird sucking sound coming from somewhere.
A hole in the boat? I looked around at our soggy barge, but
couldn’t find one.
“What makes you say that?” I shouted over the now
rushing winds.
Wordlessly, she pointed at the sea. I felt my heart drop.
“Neel!” I yelled. He was still bailing water from the back
of the boat with my boot. “I think you’d better see this!”
All around our boat rose a wall of spinning water, inclined
like the steep seats at an auditorium. Only, this was theater in
the round, and we were the performers.
“We’re in the middle of a whirlpool!”
The sucking sound was the water below us getting pulled
downward. To make matters worse, on the top edges of the
giant water tornado were what looked like gigantic rakkhosh
fangs.
“Yum! Yum! In my tum!”
The all-too-familiar voice echoed weirdly from within the
unnatural torrent of water.
“Oh gods! He’s more powerful than I thought!” yelled
Neel. “This isn’t a whirlpool; it’s that demon brat’s open
mouth—and he’s going to eat us all!”
That snot-nosed newborn demon transformed himself into a
whirlpool?” I screamed furiously at Neel. “Is there more stuff
you people can do that you didn’t tell me?” I rowed like a wild
thing, as did all of us, but our boat was going nowhere.
“He shouldn’t be able to! A newborn practice that kind of
complicated magic? I’ve never heard such a thing,” Neel
protested. “There has to be someone helping him!”
There weren’t enough oars, and he was bent over the side
trying to muscle us physically up the mountain of water. But it
wasn’t working. For every few inches we moved forward, we
moved more back down toward the whirlpool’s center.
“Well, he’s obviously smarter than we gave him credit for!”
I could barely see, there was so much water rushing into my
eyes.
“Stop arguing, for goodness’ sake,” Baba said, putting his
shoulder into his oaring. “It’s not very royal behavior on either
of your parts!”
“Oh dear, I’m afraid we are traversing backward,” Ma
piped in.
She was right. Despite our best efforts, our barge was
sliding inevitably down the demonic drain. Or demonic
digestive system, as the case may be.
“Yum! Yum! Snaky King is a big dum-dum!”
“What did he say? Oh no, what did he say?”
The boat went almost vertical and tumbled backward.
 “Yaaaa!” I wasn’t sure who was shouting, but the last thing
I saw before we got pulled down into the center of the
whirlpool were people—and a bird and two magical spheres—
that I didn’t want to lose.
It was a long way down—history-test long, humiliating-
moment-in-the-locker-room long, Alice-falling-down-the-
rabbit-hole long. And dark. And loud. And terrifying.
When we landed—with a hard thunk, I might add—it
wasn’t in the demon’s stomach, but in a relatively dry
undersea cavern. The peacock barge, luckily, was equipped
with airbags, and they seriously broke our fall. (Go magical
crash-test systems!)
We climbed out, leaving the gold and silver balls in the
barge for safekeeping, and looked around. I could hear the
water of the whirlpool still swirling above us. The scene was
all too familiar. The demon baby was nowhere to be seen. But
someone else was.
“Hello, Sssissster,” said a set of seven nasty voices.
 I whipped around to see that last-place winner for brother
of the year—Naga, the seven-headed snake.
“Oh, booger-nosed snot fest, where did YOU come from?”
“Daughter, your mouth.”
“Yesss, indeed, your mou-sss,” hissed the cobra heads in
unison. In a flash, Naga wrapped Ma, Baba, and even poor
terrified Tuntuni in his coils. As a last flourish, he slapped his
nasty tail over all their mouths. They were effectively bound
and gagged.
“Let them go!” Neel brandished his sword. Even in the
dark cavern, it glinted with an inner light.
“Now!” I aimed my arrow at the largest of his seven
hooded heads. The snake lunged at me, flicking seven forked
tongues.
 I saw Baba’s eyes widen at something behind me even
before I heard the chilling voice. I whirled around, my arrow
still raised. I should have known who was behind all this.
“Children, children, why all the fuss?” The Serpent King
slithered into the room—his top half human, but his bottom
half in his terrible serpentine form. “Do you like my new
undersea residence?” he oozed. “It’s a rental, and I’m still
waiting on the interior decorator …”
“You!” Neel ran at the Serpent King, his sword aimed at
my birth father’s throat.
“Impudent demon-ling!” The Serpent King held up his
hand, sending Neel’s sword clattering to the floor with a bolt
of green lightning. “Did you actually think you could destroy
my glorious kingdom and get away with it?”
“Stop!” I whirled back around and aimed my arrow at the
largest of the cobra’s seven heads. “Let them all go—it’s me
you want. Otherwise … I shoot Naga!”
The Serpent King waved a callous hand, mocking Naga’s
snakey lisp. “Oh, shoot him, what do I care? You’d think those
ssssseven ssssstupid heads would make him sssssmarter. But
he let you get away last time, didn’t he?”
If it was possible for a magical seven-headed cobra to look
hurt, he did. But it’s not like my snake-brother got all warm
and fuzzy as a result. In fact, he squeezed his prey even harder.
Ma and Baba sputtered, their faces red, and an alarming
number of yellow feathers discharged from where Tuntuni
must be—almost invisible in the folds of cobra muscle.
“Stop!” I shrieked, turning to the Serpent King. “Please!
He’ll kill them!”
“So what?” snarled my biological father. “Did you show
my poor snakes any mercy? Hmm? Did you?”
 “Let them go!” I sent an arrow flying at the Serpent King,
but he stopped it mid-flight with a green bolt. As I aimed a
second arrow, the Serpent King shot another bolt of green
lightning, this time directly at my hands. My beautiful bow
exploded in green flames. I dropped it, before falling to the
ground myself. Where the green fire hit me, my arms felt like
they were burning, only from the inside out. It was agony.
Neel had picked up his sword again, and ran screaming at
the Serpent King. “Aaaa!”
“Oh, will you never learn?” He shot a bolt of green, this
time a flaming sphere that imprisoned Neel within it. The
prince screamed in pain—a sound that made my blood run
cold. He writhed around within the glowing orb, his body
twisting in unnatural contortions, as if he was being tortured.
“Neel!” I shrieked, running toward him. The heat of the
sphere was scorching, and it shot out green flares. It burned
me even at a distance, like the molten surface of some alien
sun. “Neel, hang on! Hang on!”
“You’ll join him soon enough, you pathetic waste of a
daughter.” The Serpent King aimed his hands high.
“No!” Everyone I loved was going to die. And it was all
my fault. My legs couldn’t hold me up anymore, and I
collapsed. I was screaming and crying so hard, my tears were
tumbling from my face. I didn’t try to control them. I had
much more important things to worry about. But where the
tears hit my arms, something strange happened. They eased
the burning feeling of the green bolt.
My tears. In a flash, I remembered how Tuni had seemed
dead, but how he’d come to life in my arms. I’d been crying
then too. And why was it exactly I’d spent so many years
training my own tears not to spill? Had I somehow known the
power they contained?
 Unless the pearly waters of the fountain can flow free.
Were my tears the salty pearls that needed to flow free too?
And then I heard her voice, as clean and pure as a bell. The
tears of the moon’s daughter are as powerful as the tides. I felt
her strength within me, my moon-mother. I had always had it
—the strength of the night, the strength of the tides, the
strength to reflect the light of others. The strength to weep
without weakness.
“You’re not going to kill them.”
I rose from the ground, my arms outstretched. I was my
father’s child. I was my mother’s daughter. My face was still
wet, and my heart beat in rhythm with the music of the oceans.
“And you’re not going to kill me.”
The jagged green light shot at me, but I met it with a
searing white light of my own. Where they clashed, the green
glowing softened, became liquid, and fell to the floor like rain.
“No!” the Serpent King cried, his eyes burning orbs. “How
is this possible?”
“I guess there’s no getting around it. I am your daughter, at
least biologically,” I said. “I can’t hide from who I am. But it
doesn’t mean I can’t choose my own destiny.”
He shot bolt after bolt of green fire, but I met them all with
the shimmering, diamond light of my own. The intensity of its
power grew each time I aimed my hands.
When unleashed, there is no more powerful force than the
will of nature.
I was a part of nature, a moon-child, and I wanted
desperately to live, to have my loved ones live. Not die in this
horrible dark cavern, but walk together into the light.
 My body felt possessed, as if I was channeling all my
moon-mother’s energy through me. My eyes were wet and felt
like they were glowing white-hot. My hair shot out around me
—shimmering as if with electricity. And the moonlight—not
soft, but terrible, and beautiful too—shot like dancing fire
from my upturned palms.
There was a rumbling, and I knew that I was somehow
shifting the tides in the sea above our heads. I heard a familiar
groaning.
“Where din-din go? Snaky King, you steal Bogli’s din-
din?”
The cavern started to shake, and streams of water poured
down from cracks in the ceiling. Then I heard a drumbeat that
could only be the rhythmic sound of demonic footsteps.
The rakkhosh baby, Bogli. Somehow, the Serpent King had
recruited him to get us to this cavern. And now Bogli was
coming to collect his reward. The thought of facing both the
Serpent King and the baby demon should have terrified me.
But I wasn’t scared. I knew exactly who I was.
I turned to the seven-headed cobra and said, with both
sympathy and hard honesty, “You better run, Brother. All
heck’s about to break loose, and our father’s not going to save
you.”
The seven forked tongues flickered for only a moment as
Naga considered my words. Then the seven heads nodded as
the cobra unwound himself from his victims. Ma, Baba, and
Tuni fell in a collapsed heap on the ground. All injured, but all
breathing.
“Thisss isssn’t the end, Sssissster.” Naga shot his muscular
tongues in my direction, but I fended them off with a bolt of
white light.
 “Oh, I’ll count on it,” I called as the cobra slithered down a
passage and disappeared.
“Good riddance to old rubbish,” the Serpent King snarled,
aiming his claws at me. “Now to take out the rest of the trash!”
I was tired, but exhilarated. I aimed my hands, willing the
white light with all my might, but before I could, something
happened. From the streams of water pouring out of the
cracking ceiling, a woman in misty white appeared. She was
translucent, as if she existed only as a reflection in the water.
“Mother,” I breathed.
“I have let this go on for long enough!” Her voice boomed
through the cavern with an unearthly force. “I let my love for
you blind me to your darkness, but no more!”
“You are my wife,” the Serpent King snarled. “You are
bound to my darkness. You don’t have strength to kill me!”
But this was the moon’s most fierce face. Her light glowed
a thousand times brighter than mine. It was glorious and
terrifying at the same time. Confronted with such power, the
Serpent King went from scoffing to disbelieving to actually a
little worried.
Even still, he raised his hands, sneering at her. “You don’t
have the guts!”
As he launched the crackling lightning from his hands, the
moon shot a white-hot beam at the Serpent King. He glowed
an incandescent green, but then began to writhe and decay, his
energy going from green to brown to gray to black.
As his power dissipated, so did the swirling orb holding
Neel. Neel was free—panting, eyes closed, on the ground. But
free.
 When I turned back around, the Serpent King was a pile of
char. She had done it. The moon maiden had freed me, and
herself.
I could barely look at her; her aspect was so awesome and
powerful. I ducked my head in a grateful bow.
“He is gone for now, but not forever,” she said, her voice
shimmery like the ocean.
“Thank you, Mother,” I whispered.
For a moment, she touched my head with a silvery hand. I
felt the cool liquid of her touch fill me with energy, power, and
love. She slipped something strong and yet pliable in my
hands—my bow, magically intact.
“You are the daughter of the moon. But you are also the
daughter of those good people who raised you. And yes, you
are the daughter of the dark Serpent King too.” Her voice rang
like a bell in the echoing cavern. “Everything is connected to
everything, Kiranmala.”
I nodded. My eyes were too full of tears to do anything
else. It was only when I admitted to myself all of who I was
that I was able to find my deepest power.
Then my moon-mother withdrew, becoming faint and
distant again.
Her last words to me were ones of warning. “And now, you
must run, my daughter, for the demons are coming.”
The ceiling was collapsing, and the underground cavern was
filling with seawater. The thumping footsteps of the baby
demon were fast upon us, and everyone was half unconscious
from the attack of my serpent relatives. Just another average
day in the alternate dimension.
“Neel, get up!” I didn’t have time to be super sympathetic
right now. He was a demon prince and a fast healer, and I
needed his help with the others. I hauled him up by the armpits
and yelled into his half-focused face. “Come on, daycare
demon’s on his way, and we’ve got to get out of here!”
I was thinking about slapping him across the face, but he
got it together about the third time I shook him. The water in
the cavern was already waist-high.
“Let’s get the others in the boat.”
Neel and I half dragged, half carried Ma, Baba, and Tuntuni
into the peacock barge. The golden and silver spheres rolled
around as if glad to see us. My parents were holding up okay,
but the small bird had really gotten the worst of it. He
sputtered and coughed, his face and body badly bruised.
Ma wrapped the bird in the frayed end of her sari, but her
troubled eyes were on me. “Are you all right, my golden one?”
I couldn’t say anything. Fat tears fell out of my eyes. Now
that I’d turned on the faucet, I couldn’t seem to shut it off.
Ma and Baba were horrified at the sight of me crying. “Are
you hurt? Oh, what can we do? Is it your bowels?” They
looked as if they thought I was going to die.
 “No, it’s not that,” I sniffled. “It’s just that you didn’t ask to
get involved in this. All you did was take care of me. You tried
to tell me—but I never believed your stories. Can you ever
forgive me?”
Their faces cleared.
“Shona, none of this is your fault.” Ma wiped my tears with
her fingers. “We are your parents; it’s our job to take care of
you. We will always love you, no matter what.”
“We humans may not be powerful or magical,” Baba
added, holding me close. “But the stories we pass on to our
children can be.”
“I hate to break up this touching moment,” Neel
interrupted, “but we’ve got to find a way out of here before the
cavern is totally flooded.”
As if on cue, we heard a familiar voice bellow.
“Where you go, din-din? Here, little din-din, come to Bogli
belly!”
We all started rowing like crazy.
As we hauled the boat as fast as we could down a stony
passage, I noticed my parents were looking a lot more
sprightly. My tears seemed to have cleared up the bruises on
their faces and hands. And even the few tears that hit Tuntuni,
in my mother’s lap, had done him a lot of good. The little bird
ruffled his feathers, and then flew over to help Baba row.
The narrow passages made everything echo. Now the baby
demon’s voice seemed to be coming from everywhere.
“Come to Bogli, little din-din.”
And then we heard the most disturbing sound. Like
someone was slurping a thick milk shake through a tiny straw.
 “What is that?” I began to ask, when I realized what I was
hearing. Oh gods, we were moving backward. That imbecilic
demon brat was sucking the cavern water dry—and in the
process pulling us toward him!
“Row! Row!” I yelled, and my parents obeyed. Neel,
bizarrely, did not.
“What are you doing?” He’d pulled out his sword and was
standing at the back of the boat, like some kind of
advertisement for a one-leg-lifted-in-the-air pirate.
“I’m tired of this snot-nosed rakkhosh baby calling the
shots,” he yelled. We were getting sucked back so fast now,
Neel’s hair was swirling around his head.
“I think I’m retiring as a demonic pacifist.” Neel’s teeth
flashed. “I’m going to kick some rakkhosh baby butt!”
We were back in the main cavern again and could see Bogli
at one end. The demon was crouched low to the ground,
sucking the water like some kind of deranged elephant. His
beady red eyes glowed at the sight of us.
“Come to belly! Come to belly!” he squealed.
“I’ll come to your belly, all right,” Neel shouted, jumping
off the boat into the ankle-deep water. “I’ll come to your belly
to cut it in half!”
With a ferocious yell, Neel charged the demon.
“We’ll be fine, don’t worry,” I called to my parents as I
jumped out right behind him, my weapon raised. The magic
bow vibrated in my hands as I volleyed arrow after arrow in
the demon’s direction. My moon-mother must have done
something to my quiver as well, because, no matter how many
arrows I shot, it kept refilling on its own.
 My arrow tips glowed with white-hot moonlight, and where
they hit the rakkhosh, they burned. The confused creature
batted at the stinging missiles.
“Ow! Mean girl has mean pointies! Why you so mean?”
Neel was on him now, slashing at his ankles with his
sword. Bereft of the Serpent King’s magical backup, the baby
rakkhosh seemed to cower.
“Ow! You mean too! Why hurt Bogli?”
“Bogli needs to back off!” Neel shouted. “Stop chasing us,
got it?” He was right up in the baby demon’s face, pointing his
sword at Bogli’s eyeball.
The rakkhosh sat down with a plunk on the wet cavern
floor.
“Mama! Mama!” Bogli wailed. “Boy yell at Bogli!”
“Mama?” I moaned.
“Let’s get out of here!” Baba yelled from behind me. “We
don’t want to meet his mother!”
Unfortunately, we already had. Because, in a puff of acrid-
smelling smoke, who should be standing there but …
“Ma?” Neel yelled. “Are you kidding me?”
I stared. “Are you trying to tell me that Bogli is your …”
“Adopted daughter? Yes, as a matter of fact, she is just
that.” The Demon Queen picked her front teeth with a
sharpened nail. “Say hello to your little sister, darling.”
Sister? I choked back a snort.
“Bogli’s a girl?” The odd revelation seemed to take the
anger right out of Neel’s sails.
 “Do you have a problem with that?” The Queen crossed her
taloned hands over her chest, her nostrils spewing flames.
“Have I raised some kind of demonic sexist? A purveyor of
rakkhosh patriarchy?”
Huh. Maybe I liked Neel’s mother more than I realized.
Behind the Queen, Bogli stuck her giant thumb in her even
more giant mouth. “Big Bwother!” she bellowed.
Neel shook his head. “Enough stupid tricks.” He pointed
his sword at his mother’s throat. “You tell us how to turn Lal
and Mati back. You tell us now!”
“They’re still trapped?” The Demon Queen belly-laughed
hard and long, only stopping when she burped. “Vah! Some
big demon prince you turned out to be—you haven’t even
figured that out yet?”
“Tell us, Ma!”
The rakkhoshi rolled her eyes, “Oh, come on, Moon Moon
Sen, you haven’t the faintest idea?”
“Well.” I looked apologetically at Neel. “I did have one
thought …”
“Let’s have it, then!” the demoness urged.
Neel pulled me aside. “Are you seriously having this
conversation? Did you forget she tried to eat my brother and
Mati?”
“Well, she didn’t kill them, did she? And don’t you want to
know how to bring them back?”
I turned again to the demoness. “Well, Your Highness …”
The Queen puffed up, raising one hairy eyebrow in her
son’s direction. “At least some people know how to show
respect, eh?”
 Neel snarled, still clutching his sword.
I ignored him. “That line in the poem—” I started.
“Poem?” the Queen interrupted.
“Tuntuni’s poem … it said—”
“That interfering birdbrain of a minister? Is he still up to
his tricks?”
I heard a faint squawk from the peacock barge behind us. I
hoped that one of my parents had sat on the bird to keep him
quiet.
“Are you going to let her talk or not?” Neel snapped.
“Fine, fine.” The demoness waved her hands at me. “Go
on, Stella Luna.”
“ ‘Let golden branch grow from the silver tree,’ ” I quoted.
“So I was thinking: Prince Lal is golden—of royal blood. The
stable master’s daughter—though loyal and honorable—is not.
How could a golden branch grow from a silver tree?”
Now that she was in her mother’s care, Bogli seemed to
have all the bite—and intelligence—of a trained house pet.
She clapped happily for my efforts. “Mean girl smart!”
“I don’t get it,” interrupted Neel.
“Such a disappointment!” the demoness moaned, rubbing
her stomach. “Oh, my reflux! My kingdom for an antacid!”
Neel was looking murderously at his mother. I jumped in to
distract him. “Lal’s the golden branch, but he needs Mati, the
silver tree, around him to grow into his full potential as a
ruler.”
“Okaaay,” Neel said slowly. “It’s true. Lal and Mati are
friends and she is a good influence on his confidence, or
whatever. He’s definitely less flaky when he’s around her.”
 “Right, but the Raja and the queens will never allow Lal
and Mati to continue to be friends, right? Not now that he’s the
crown prince. Not as they get older.”
“No way, chickie!” The Rakkhoshi Queen cackled.
“Since they’ve been spheres, they’ve been so happy.
Humming and buzzing and hanging out together. But once
they become human again, then Mati goes back to the stables
and Lal to the palace.”
“I guess.”
“So we’ve got to convince the Raja otherwise.”
Neel looked at me, the truth dawning in his eyes. “So we
have to take them home again.”
I nodded.
“Everything is connected to everything,” drawled the
Demon Queen in a bored voice.
Neel and I both snapped around to face her.
She arched a wicked eyebrow. “Haven’t you figured out the
how part yet?”
I shook my head. To which she belched. Then, rolling her
eyes, she shouted, “By love, you morons, by love!”
We stared at her. She moved her gruesome head side to
side, cracking her neck with a gesture that reminded me of her
son.
“You’re lucky you have Loonie-Moonie here.” She pointed
a talon at Neel. “I for one am going to try to raise a real
rakkhosh this time!”
As we talked, Bogli had fallen asleep right on her mother’s
foot. The Queen shook her off, and the baby demon woke up,
bawling. The Queen slapped her hand to her forehead.
 “Am I to be forever cursed with imbecilic offspring?” the
Rakkhoshi Queen snapped, and the two demons were gone in
a puff of smelly darkness.
Her voice cackled through the vapor. “Don’t call me, dum-
dums, and I won’t call you!”
The Raja wanted to banish Neel.
“We told you not to come home without your brother!” he
bellowed.
“Well, that’s just too bad,” Neel snapped. “Because half
rakkhosh or not, I’m still your son too.”
I was proud of Neel for saying that and not just stomping
out of the throne room in a huff. I wasn’t quite as proud of the
shouting match the father and son then had.
It took my parents, Tuntuni, and me a lot of effort to calm
them both down. We all tried our best to explain to the Raja
what had happened, but it was Tuntuni who actually saved the
day with a song.
“The Demon Prince and Moonbeam Girl, each a royal
child
One father of the dark, the other loving and mild
To save a brother and a sister
To serpent land descended
With shadow’s force they drowned the snakes
And the python jewel defended
Crossed ruby seas full of jewels beneath the dark red
moon
Survived Demon Land in Ai-Ma’s arms but not a minute
too soon
In the Mountains of Illusions there sang a golden bird
 In the well of demon-birth, loving parents heard
With sword and bow and bravery, the darkness they did
hold
Tears’ magic did appear as nature’s power bold
Now home again to plant a seed for friendship’s ever
near
The branch grows from the tree of gold and silver
spheres.”
“Loving and mild,” the Raja murmured. “We like that.”
He’d been eating during most of the song, so I wasn’t sure
how much of the rest he actually understood.
Neel stole a glance at me. I nodded.
“Father, for Lal to come back into his human form, you
have to guarantee something.”
The Raja narrowed his eyes. “Kings don’t make
guarantees.”
“Do you want him back or not?” Neel practically shouted,
and was about to say more until I stepped on his foot. Hard.
“Please, sire,” I wheedled. “If Lal and Mati want to spend
more time together, you would surely not stand in their way?”
“If we had our son and heir back in human form, that’s all
we care about,” said the Raja, wringing his hands. “Yes, yes,
best friends since childhood, friendship knows no class, race
or creed, blah blah blah. We don’t like it, but we suppose that
would be fine.” He waved his hands vaguely in the direction
of the golden and silver spheres. “Just bring our boy back to
us!”
Neel and I crossed the palace gardens and went back out to
the forest. Tuntuni was waiting for us at the base of his tree.
There were two shovels propped up against the base.
 “Go to it!” the bird squawked.
Neel and I dug two holes next to each other. The sorts of
holes we dug at school on Arbor Day to plant a little memorial
tree or something. Only, Neel and I didn’t stick bulbs into the
holes; we placed the golden and silver spheres inside. They
hummed and glowed, even halfway under the dirt.

“You’re sure they won’t … like, suffocate or something?” I

asked, rubbing at my forehead with a dirty hand.
“They’re glorified bowling balls right now, Kiran, except
for the brief time they were part of the star cycle, so unless
you have a better plan as to how to make them human again, I
suggest you cover them up with dirt.”
Once we filled in dirt over the spheres, Neel watered the
spot. Then there was nothing to do but brush the dirt off our
clothing and go check on the horses.
Princess! You made it! Snowy exclaimed when we walked
into the stable.
 “So did you!” I hugged the horse around his neck. “Was it a
long flight?”
Neel looked at me curiously. “Are you talking to the
horse?”
“Yeah.” I crossed my arms across my chest. “You got a
problem with it?”
“Is that supposed to be an imitation of me or something?”
I laughed. Even if it wasn’t home, it felt good to be back.
In the morning, we ran down to the forest to see what had
happened and found a beautiful sight. Lal and Mati, sitting up
in a shimmering, silvery tree that had sprouted from the
ground overnight. Although most of the branches were silver,
it was the long glittering branch of gold on which the best
friends were sitting. With them was Tuntuni. Lal and Mati
were swinging their legs to his music, and looking pretty
happy to be back in human form.
“Brother!” Lal exclaimed, jumping down from the branch.
The two princes bro-hugged. They didn’t, however, cry.
“Cousin!” Mati ran over to throw her arms around me.
Unfortunately, she did cry. A lot. Which made me kind of tear
up too. Oh, the heck with it, I totally boo-hooed like a baby in
her arms. It was awesome to find out I had a cool horse-wench
for a cousin.
We left them there then—they didn’t seem to need us
anyway. At the stables, I turned right, toward my uncle
Rahul’s apartments, where my parents were waiting, while
Neel turned left, toward the palace.
“Kind of what it’s always been like for Lal and Mati, I
guess,” I said.
 “Only, you’re a princess, and she’s the stable master’s
daughter.”
“Well, for all intents and purposes, I’m the stable master’s
niece, the daughter of Quickie Mart owners,” I corrected.
“That’s not entirely true …”
“It is true.” I kicked a clod of dirt with my toe. “Look, it’s
not like I don’t know who I am. But in the end, they’re not the
parents I choose. I mean, which would you rather be, a snake
princess in a dark cave with a bunch of homicidal relatives you
don’t even want to know—or part of the nice, warm, non-royal
family that brought you up?”
Neel bit his lip, squinting into the distance. “You’re lucky,
you know.”
“I can’t believe I used to always get bugged about how
weird my parents were. How different they were from
everyone else’s parents in New Jersey. They only ever wanted
me to be proud of who I am.”
“That,” said Neel, “and to get enough fiber in your diet.”
I gave Neel a smack on the arm even as I laughed.
“Hey, I’ve got one for you. Why couldn’t anyone see the
bird?”
“I don’t know.” Neel grinned. “But I suspect you’re going
to tell me.”
“It was in da-skies!” I whooped.
Neel frowned. “Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Da-skies? Da-skies?” I insisted. “What does that sound
like?”
“Look, seriously, it’s all right. It’s the thought that counts.”
 “Disguise! It was in disguise!” I said, waving my arms.
“Get it? It was in disguise!”
“That’s okay, Kiran.” Neel patted my arm. “Not everybody
has to have a good sense of humor. You have other qualities
that are really nice.”
But he was laughing, and I was laughing, and everything
felt right and good.
* * *
Later, when we came back to the palace, everybody’s
happiness was a teensy bit squelched by the Raja totally
jacking up and refusing to remember his promise.
“We said no such thing,” he insisted.
“Sire, do you want your son and heir to return to his other
form?” Tuntuni snapped.
And so, despite the queens wailing and beating their not-
inconsequential bosoms and smashing their bangles against the
floor, the Raja officially promised not to stand in the way of
any friendship between Lal and Mati. Tuntuni actually
produced a document from somewhere called a “Treaty of
Royal-to-Non-Royal Friendship Noninterference” and made
the Raja sign it, there and then. The handsome human prince
and his loyal stable maid couldn’t seem happier at this. It was
strange, but I could swear they still hummed and vibrated in
each other’s presence.
As for Neel, he was still acting pretty mysterious. Finally,
he admitted what it was. “I’ll have to go soon and fulfill my
word to the shadow merchant.”
We were standing in a quiet corner of the throne room,
where the festivities for Lal’s return were going on full blast.
I’d dressed in my mother’s red wedding sari, with the same
jewels I’d once hated wearing. Ma had styled my hair so that it
swept off my neck, and the scar on my arm was completely
visible too. I didn’t care. They were a part of who I was.
Anyway, I looked—and felt—like a total princess.
Mati stuck by Lal’s side through the whole party, as the
people of the kingdom showered their crown prince with love
and affection. It was strange to see how easy it was for Neel to
slip away unnoticed. Because he was a half demon, it was as if
he didn’t count, that people seemed to think he was hardly
worth counting.
Of course, what I was realizing was that Neel counted to
me. He counted very much. I remembered that ominous
promise he made to the seller of shadows and how upset Lal
was to hear his brother make it.
“How could you promise to give her your soul?” The
thought made me sick. “Of all the insane, irresponsible things
to do—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Neel cut me off. “Why do
you think that? I didn’t promise Chhaya Devi my soul.” He
had a little smile on his lips. “But it’s nice to know you
worry.”
“You didn’t promise her your soul? Then what is it?”
“Chhaya Devi used to be our nanny, a long time ago, before
she got into the shady world of shadow selling.”
“Very punny.”
“Seriously, she’s not as young as she used to be, and she’s
always trying to convince us to stay with her for a couple of
months and help her catch shadows.”
“Then why was your brother so upset when you
promised?”
 “Really?” Neel pointed at Lal and Mati, who were gazing
at each other all glowy like. “He didn’t want to be separated
again from Mati.”
“Oh.” I looked down at the purple boots that I’d worn
under my sari, which had made me feel all sorts of awesome
and rebellious when I’d put them on. Now I just felt seriously
stupid.
“So …” Neel stared at my shoes too, like I had the secrets
of the universe written on them. “I guess, after all this is done,
you’re going to go back, huh?”
“To Jersey?” I nodded. “I think my parents always thought
they’d move back here some day, but now that we’re here, it’s
not at all the way they remember it. More demons, I guess,” I
laughed. “I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know if the place has
changed or they’ve changed, but Ma says she can’t bear to
think of her house as a disaster zone, and Baba gets seriously
choked up at the thought of all the spoiling store inventory.”
“Your parents want to go back, but what about you?” Neel
said in a lower voice.
I bit my lip. My eyes were getting a little hot. “Well, I’ve
still got to finish the sixth grade,” I babbled. “I’ve missed a
major Spanish test while I was gone, not to mention a ton of
homework. And my math teacher will probably beat me with
her protractor for how behind I am, and besides, Zuzu’ll be
totally worried …”
There was a pause, and neither of us looked directly at the
other. My face glowed with heat.
“Well, you sneak through wormholes all the time, don’t
you?” I finally asked. “I mean, like, to see movies and stuff?”
Gah, would he think I was asking him out to a movie? Was
I asking him out to a movie? I wanted to ask him out to a
movie, I realized.
I mentally kicked myself. I’d made it through some pretty
life-or-death situations recently, and yet, why was this one the
most tricky to figure out?
Neel stared off at a weird angle behind my head, chewing a
nail. “Yeah, yeah, I like to see movies, but mostly stuff you
probably wouldn’t like. Old vampire flicks and science fiction,
weird stuff.”
“No, I love that kind of thing,” I said quickly. Maybe too
quickly.
“Oh, okay. Then I guess we’ll have to go see something
really bloody and scary next time I’m over in your realm.
Maybe something in 3-D.”
I grinned. “Is that a promise?”
Neel squirmed. So did I. We didn’t meet the other’s eyes.
“And maybe I can come visit, stay with Mati and her dad,”
I said finally.
“Yeah, that would be great.”
“Bye, Demon Prince,” I said in a low voice.
“See ya around, Moon Girl,” Neel said before he turned
around and walked away. As he did, I realized that he too was
blushing.
The Serpent’s Secret is an original story that draws from many
traditional folktales and children’s stories from West Bengal,
India, which have been told by grandparents, parents, aunties,
and uncles to generations of children. I’ve used many of these
stories as a basis for inspiration while writing The Serpent’s
Secret—and as a way to tell my own story as an immigrant
daughter. In the same way that Kiran has to discover the land
of her parents in order to really understand herself, I spent
many summer vacations in Kolkata, India, getting to know not
just my language and family, but getting immersed in Bengali
cultural stories. My grandmothers and aunts would tell me
these tales, usually before bed. My cousins and I would curl up
together under the magical protection of a mosquito net, while
the whirring overhead fan made the netting dance gently about
us. In hearing these stories of talking birds, flying horses,
brave princes, clever princesses, and evil rakkhoshi queens, I
felt like I was entering an amazing new universe of
imagination. When I was writing this novel, it only made
sense to have Kiran return not to a real country, but to a place
populated and inspired by these traditional stories themselves.
Thakurmar Jhuli and Rakkhosh Stories
Folktales involving rakkhosh are very popular in West Bengal,
as they are in many parts of India. The word is sometimes
spelled rakshasa in other parts of India, but in this book, it is
spelled like the word sounds in Bengali. Folktales are of
course an oral tradition, passed on verbally from one
generation to the next, with each teller adding spice and
nuance to their own version. In 1907, Dakshinaranjan Mitra
Majumdar collected, wrote down, and published some classic
Bengali folktales in a book called Thakurmar Jhuli
(“Grandmother’s Satchel”), and the introduction to that book
was written by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. This
collection, which involves separate stories about the Princess
Kiranmala and the brothers Neelkamal and Lalkamal, is also
full of tales involving rakkhosh and khokkosh, as well as
stories about the Kingdom of Serpents and the magical land of
Maya Pahar. Pakkhiraj horses are plentiful in Thakurmar
Jhuli, as are evil snakes, stupid kings, and peacock barges. The
demon queen hungry for Lalkamal’s blood appears in the
original Neelkamal and Lalkamal story, as does the lovably
goofy rakkhoshi grandmother, Ai-Ma. Lalkamal and
Neelkamal never meet Kiranmala in their original stories, but
brave Kiranmala does have two brothers named Arun and
Barun, whose lives she must save. A version of the Serpent
King appears in this collection as well, although not exactly as
he appears in this book. And the dumb khokkosh who get
fooled into thinking Kiran and Neel are rakkhosh by a sword,
some arrows, and an oil lamp? All inspired by Thakurmar
Jhuli. Thakurmar Jhuli stories are still immensely popular in
West Bengal and Bangladesh, and have inspired translations,
films, television cartoons, comic books, and more. Rakkhosh
are very popular as well—the demons everyone loves to hate
—and appear not just in folk stories but also Hindu mythology.
Images of bloodthirsty, long-fanged rakkhosh can be seen
everywhere—even on the back of colorful Indian trucks, as a
warning to other drivers not to tailgate or drive too fast!
Abol Tabol and Sukumar Ray
Sukumar Ray can be considered the Dr. Seuss or Lewis Caroll
of the Bengali literary tradition. His illustrated book of
nonsense rhymes, Abol Tabol, was first published in 1923, but
like Thakurmar Jhuli, it is an evergreen Bengali children’s
favorite. The character Mr. Madan Mohan in this book was
inspired by two nonsense poems from Abol Tabol—the first
about a man with a bizarre contraption on his back that
dangles food in front of his face (“Khuror Kal”), and the
second about an office worker who is convinced that someone
has stolen his very hairy and very much present moustache
(“Gopf Churi”). The snake-charming poem that Tuntuni
recites, “Baburam Sapure” also appears in Abol Tabol. Two
other characters in The Serpent’s Secret were also inspired by
Sukumar Ray’s brilliant poems, that of the rhyming transit
officer, who appears in a poem called “Bhoye Peo Na” (“Don’t
be Afraid”), and Chhaya Devi, purveyor of shadows, who was
inspired by a poem called “Chhaya Baji.”
Tuntuni
The wisecracking bird Tuntuni is another favorite, and
recurrent, character of Bengali children’s folktales. The father
of Sukumar Ray, Upendrakishore Ray Chowdhury (also
known as Upendrakishore Ray), collected a number of these
stories starring the clever tailor bird Tuntuni in a 1910 book
called Tuntunir Boi (“The Tailor Bird’s Book”).
Panchatantra
The thirsty crow is a story that appears in many cultural
traditions. The Indian version appears in the Panchatantra, an
ancient collection of interrelated animal tales thought to have
first appeared around the third century BCE.
Astronomy
There are a number of references to astronomy in this book,
most notably to black holes and the life cycle of a star. This is
because, like in every culture, traditional Indian stories are
often infused with stories about the stars and planets. Like
ancient peoples in Egypt or Greece, long ago Indians
wondered what controlled the sun, moon, and stars, and made
up many stories and myths to explain their behavior. When
writing The Serpent’s Secret, I was inspired by scientific
writing about dark matter, dark energy, string theory,
Einstein’s ring, and the star cycle, but much of what comes in
between in this story is entirely fanciful and fictional! Please
don’t take anything in this book as scientific fact, but rather
use the story to inspire some more research about astronomy
and, of course, His Brilliance, the Guru-ji Albert Einstein!
Other Random References
There are a lot of other Indian references in the story. Moon
Moon Sen is a well-known actress. Kati rolls are a popular
Kolkata street food snack, while luchi, sandesh, and rasagolla
are all very classic Bengali foods. The absurd signs in Demon
Land and Maya Pahar were inspired by the often hilarious,
usually misspelled Indian signs on roadsides, highways, and
even the back of trucks. The idea that there is a universal soul,
and our bodies are but temporary vessels that on our death
return our essence to that universal stream, is a central—if
simplified—idea of Hindu philosophy. The German nursery
rhyme the star-babies sing in Dr. Einstein’s class is a real
German song, with slightly altered lyrics thrown in.
And I have no doubt that almost every daughter of Indian
immigrants, like me, was forced to dress up like a “real Indian
princess.” Every. Single. Halloween!
If you’d like to read more Bengali folk stories, here are
some books in English:

The Demon Slayers and Other Stories: Bengali

Folktales by Sayantani DasGupta (that’s me) and
Shamita Das Dasgupta (that’s my mom). New York, NY:
Interlink, 1995.

The Ghost Catcher by Martha Hamilton and Mitch

Weiss. Atlanta, GA: August House, 2008.
The Buri and the Marrow by Henriette Barkow.
London, UK: Mantra Lingua, 2000.

Tuntuni, the Tailor Bird by Betsy Bang. New York, NY:

Greenwillow Books, 1978.
Kiranmala would never have been successful on her quest
without the help of her friends and family, and the same goes
for the publication of this book. First and foremost, I must
heartily thank my agent, Brent Taylor, who championed this
story with clear-eyed enthusiasm, stalwart belief, and mad
skill. And to his colleague Uwe Stender—vielen vielen Dank
für Alles! I’d like to humbly thank Abigail McAden and
Patrice Caldwell—the best editorial demon slayers around,
who not only helped me write better and dream bigger but also
made every moment of this process a delight.
Thank you to Vivienne To and the entire art department at
Scholastic, particularly the visionary Elizabeth Parisi, for this
beautiful cover and art, and Abby Dening for her clever
interior design. To Rachel Gluckstern, my production editor;
Rebekah Wallin, my copyeditor; Talia Seidenfeld, my
eleventh-hour proofreader; and the rest of Team Kiranmala
including intergalactic marketing and publicity heroes Rachel
Feld, Lizette Serrano, Tracy van Straaten, and Jennifer Abbots
—thank you again and again for helping me share these
beloved stories from Bengal with a global audience of readers.
Thank you to the best critique group around—Sheela Chari,
Veera Hiranandani, and Heather Tomlinson—who believed in
my stories even when I forgot how and continue to help me
grow as a writer and reader. Eternal love and gratitude to my
writing sister, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich, who plies me
with wisdom, inspiration, and gluten-free treats, and to my
oldest sister-friend, Kari Scott, who shared my love of stories
in childhood and does still. (I wouldn’t be writing stories now
if not for all those summer afternoons reading them, watching
them, and acting them out with you.) I’m also indebted to my
sis and dance partner Mallika Chopra and her brother Gautam
for their invaluable support and advice on this project and so
many others.
Endless gratitude to the entire We Need Diverse Books,
Kidlit Writers of Color, and Desi Writers families. I am proud
to be a part of such a visionary group of artists who are writing
a more just future into reality every day. Thank you to my
local creative moms posse, Kerri, Viv, Liv, Laura, Meg, Jill,
and the real Jovi—who is nothing like the mean girl named
after her—for reminding me all the time that parenting and art
go hand in hand. Lots of love too to my Bengali community
from childhood and now for helping me celebrate the rich,
funny, wacky, and powerful reality of being a Bengali
immigrant daughter in New Jersey.
Thank you to my narrative medicine/health humanities
colleagues at Columbia and around the country, who taught
me that stories are the best medicine. Lots of gratitude as well
to my former pediatric patients and my current undergraduate
and graduate students, who teach me, inspire me, and fill me
with hope for the future of this planet.
To my loving parents, Sujan and Shamita, and my entire
extended family of storytellers, I am so grateful to have
received these stories at your feet. To my husband, Boris, and
my beloved partners in crime, Kirin and Sunaya—thank you
for cheering me on every step of the way. You are the joy, you
are the magic, you are the feeling of flying through the sky. I’d
slay all the demons for you, my darlings, in this universe and
all the rest.
SAYANTANI DASGUPTA grew up hearing stories about
brave princesses, bloodthirsty rakkhosh, and flying pakkhiraj
horses. She is a pediatrician by training but now teaches at
Columbia University. When she’s not writing or reading,
Sayantani spends time watching cooking shows with her
trilingual children and protecting her black Labrador retriever,
Khushi, from the many things that scare him, including plastic
bags. She is a team member of We Need Diverse Books and
can be found online at www.sayantanidasgupta.com and on
Twitter at @sayantani16.
The first time the Demon Queen appeared in my bedroom, I
tried to decapitate her with my solar system nightlight.
I was fast asleep, but got woken up by the freaky sound of
buzzing. Then I smelled that rancid, belch-y, acid-y odor I’d
come to associate with the rakkhoshi during my adventures in
the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers. As
soon as I opened my eyes, I saw her tell-tale outline: pointy
crown on her giant head, sharp horns peeking through her dark
hair, and evil talons reaching from her long arms.
I reached for my magic bow and quiver under my bed, but
when my hand came up empty, I remembered I’d left them in
my locker at school. So instead, I laced my fingers through the
plastic rings of Saturn, yanked my old nightlight from the
socket, and spun the entire solar system like a flying discus
right at the Rakkhoshi Rani’s head.
Unfortunately, the sun and orbiting planets never managed
to hit her. To my shock, the plastic solar system just sailed
through her see-through, sari-clad body, crashing on the front
of my Princess Pretty Pants dresser, part of the disgustingly
princess-themed bedroom set my parents had bought me when
I was, like, six.
“Honestly, Moon-girl! Is that any way to greet the mother
of an old friend?” The rakkhoshi’s fangs glinted in the
moonlight that streamed through my curtain-less windows.
Then she stretched her claw-like hand toward the fallen night-
light, making the plastic explode with a fiery bang.
 “Stop that!” I ran out of bed, throwing my bedside glass of
water on the place my bubble-gum pink carpet was burning. It
did basically nothing to squelch the flames, though. “You’re
going to burn the whole house down!” The smell of melting
plastic gagged me as Mercury and Venus started ooblecking
right before my eyes.
“Spoil sport!” The Demon Queen drawled, but she did lean
over and breathe an icy gust of wind onto the burning planets
—a little mini hailstorm—leaving a charred and smelly solar
system on my bedroom floor.
“You’re not real.” I blinked my eyes, trying to wake myself
up. “I’m imagining this.”
The demoness belched. Loudly. “You don’t have enough
imagination to conjure the likes of me!”
Hoping to catch her off-guard, just in case I was wrong
about the whole being-a-nightmare thing, I launched myself at
the rakkhoshi with a ferocious yowl. But she just yawned, and
let me go flying right through her vaporous form.
I slammed into my dresser, hitting my head hard on a tiara-
shaped drawer knob. “I knew you weren’t real!”
“Oh, fie on your underdeveloped cranium, you pea-brained
tree-goat!” The queen picked her teeth with a long nail.
“Listen up, I have something important to tell you. A matter of
life and death. About…”
“What?” I prompted from my position sprawled out on the
floor.
“Oof!” The demoness made a choking sound, grabbing at
her throat. She repeated the nonsensical word, fluttering her
hands like she wasn’t getting enough air. “Oof! Eesh! Arré!”
Then, her image flickered, like she was a broken movie
reel.
 It went on like this, night after night. The Rakkhoshi Rani
showing up in her smelly but see-through form, insulting me,
trying to tell me something, but then disappearing.
If the demoness were real, I would have guessed this was
some kind of trick. But since she obviously couldn’t be, I
could only surmise I should stop sneaking so many chocolate
chip cookies before bedtime. Because man, was this a super
weird dream. Every time we got to the part where she wanted
to tell me her secret, the rakkhoshi would open her mouth and
flap her lips, like some kind of landed demonic fish. She
would claw at her throat. Her mouth would move, but no
sound would come out. Eventually, her image would flicker
and fade altogether.
The closest she got to telling me her secret was one night
when she managed to tell me some kind of riddle poem that
made absolutely no sense when I first heard it:
Elladin belladin, Milk White Sea
Who seeks immortality?
A drum and flame, eternity
Life and death in balance be
My heart in chains where my soul sings
The prison key a bee’s wings
With father’s tooth you crack the case
Humility must wash your face
Sacrifice is love’s reward
The path of truth is ever hard
Justice can’t be stopped by a wall
Purity is not the end-all
 Without the dark, the light will fail
Gods and demons both will rail
Elladin, belladin, Milk White Sea
Who seeks immortality?
“What is all that supposed to mean? What’s that elladin
belladin stuff anyway?”
“Oh, this pancreatic pain! This gaseous gallbladder!” The
queen groaned. “Try to listen between the lines, khichuri-
brain!”
“I’m trying!” It was hard to win an argument with a
figment of my imagination. “If I figure out your riddle, will
you leave me alone?”
“Oh, the intestinal agony of your stupidity!” The rakkhoshi
grew so big in her frustration, her crown grazed my old-
fashioned popcorn ceiling. She blew green smoke out of her
ears and nose, and burped like she was lactose intolerant and
had just eaten a cheesy burrito chased by a dozen milkshakes.
“You can’t understand, can you Loonie-Moonie?”
“Of course I can’t understand! Because you’re. Not. Real!”
I shouted so loud I actually woke myself up.
Coming back from the bathroom, though, I couldn’t help
but stare at the dents in the popcorn ceiling, the flakes of
plaster on the foot of my bedspread, the half-melted solar
system on my dresser, and the charred spot on my carpet. Plus,
my bedroom smelled all gaseous like it was at the receiving
end of an exhaust vent straight from a garbage dump.
But that was all just my middle-of-the-night imagination.
Or maybe some cookie-induced sleepwalking. The nightlight
was obviously so old and decrepit it had just spontaneously
combusted. And the smell was probably a lingering
combination of melted plastic and some nasty gym clothes that
I’d forgotten to wash. Or so I tried to convince myself.
But the thing about subconscious dreams that aren’t
actually subconscious dreams? Eventually, they come back to
bite you in the chocolate chip.
 Copyright © 2018 by Sayantani DasGupta
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint
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assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or
are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, March 2018
Book design by Abby Dening
Border designs by Abby Dening with imagery ©:
RedKoala/Shutterstock; Alex Sunset/Shutterstock; and Filip
Bjorkman/Shutterstock.
Cover illustration © 2018 by Vivienne To
Cover design by Elizabeth B. Parisi
Author photo by Chris X. Carroll
e-ISBN 978-1-338-18572-0
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